IF ALL GOES WELL (why wouldn’t they go well? Except for all the times things have gone less than well in the past) I will have the keys to my new house in the next hour or two. I am too nervous to write anything. Please use this open thread to talk about any and all of the following:
– Why I shouldn’t have bought a house in the first place
– The worst or most interesting roommate/landlord stories you hold in your possession
– What a person who has just bought a house but doesn’t know how to run a house should consider buying at some sort of home goods store
– Just real bad real estate/rental horror stories full of bugs and toxic radon mold that will scare me but also reassure me
– Links to massive country estates I could have purchased in Tehachapi or just outside of Butte if I’d been willing to live off the land for the same price
– Fun stories about easy and profitable real estate deals/how to become a mogul by purchasing one modest-sized California home
Thank you for your time. *chews hands off in anticipation*
Tags: i HAVEN’T HAD A WINDOW IN ALMOST TWO YEARS, open thread, real estate
We bought two one bedrooms with plans on combining them into one so we got a contractor on recommendation and got plans and then left for two weeks to get out of their way
We came back and nothing had been done, furious we call the contractor up and demanded an answer
Turns out he skied into a tree the day we left and was only now back from the brink of death
So nothing had progressed on the house AND we felt like horrible assholes.
We did however allow him to sell us on his relative’s choice for appliances (they got a comission, naturally) and they where so ugly and poorly made that I feel I’ve suffered enough.
My company sold a customer a wood stove, and another chimney sweep was going to install it. So we got the stove in, and I called the sweep to set up a time. His wife answered the phone, and told me that he had died suddenly over the weekend. So that was fun.
Not housing related, but I had something similar with my very first client as a lawyer (when I was working in my law school’s clinic).
I was assigned to work with a gentleman who didn’t appear for our first appointment, and I sent him the mandatory stern letter about showing up for appointments if he wanted to continue using the clinic’s services. Then I found out from his mother that he’d died the day before.
(Fortunately, his family was very nice about it, and we were able to help them with a guardianship case involving his two children. But I felt REALLY terrible).
I rented a tiny house with a couple friends my senior year of college. It was dinky, fronted on an alley, and nothing every quite worked. It was, however, dirt cheap. It was on a large lot and the landlady lived in a normal sized house on the other corner. She was elderly and smoked constantly. One night, I was cooking dinner and she came over to tell me that she was actually finally going to call a plumber to look at the shower drain that hadn’t drained for weeks. She then started talking about how she’d gotten some lovely asparagus at the grocery store that were just the right size and so inexpensive, all while demonstrating their size with her middle finger. It was all I could do to keep from laughing at my landlady flipping me off while talking about asparagus.
Oh my god, landladies. I had one in college who insisted that none of us use the back door of the house to enter or leave because our keys didn’t work in the lock (intentionally!) and it MUST, repeat MUST, be locked behind us when we left. Even though the front door of the house stood unlocked almost 24/7 because there were 30 of us living there and anyone could walk right in and we’d assume it was someone else’s friend, and we all locked our bedroom doors anyway to compensate for that glaring security flaw.
To this day I have no idea why she didn’t want our keys to work in the lock. She had specifically designed it so that the back door was a useless feature to legit tenants. She’d do surprise inspections sometimes during the day when we were all in class (which I now know is illegal, but didn’t then) by trying to enter through the back door and if it was unlocked she’d round up the house for a stern lecture that evening. But joke’s on her, because we used it anyway and she could never pin it on just one of us, and you can’t punish a whole houseful of people for leaving a door unlocked.
eta: looking back she seemed to think that since we were all between the ages of 18 and 22 she had the right to “lecture” us and threaten vague “punishments” that I’m assuming would have been deductions from our security deposits or something? and that’s just weird.
Oh man, that’s completely nuts. Rental agencies have their issues, but at least they tend to be less crazy that some people who just rent out one house. To be fair I’ve also had some pretty awesome landlords/ladies in my day.
Also, the locking of bedroom doors reminds me of the roommate we had in the tiny house for a couple months who wanted us to leave the front door unlocked at night so her boyfriend could come visit after he got off of work (after we’d all agreed that there wouldn’t be SOs staying over). I didn’t sleep at all those nights and did internal dances of glee when she moved out.
Ah, crazy landladies! I sublet a place for one summer owned by a very eccentric Polish lady, who’d I guess was in her 90s. She would drop by at all kinds of weird times just to see what was going on.
One time when she was over, my roommate (a very nice guy who was very respectful of the property) happened to rest his hands against the bedroom door frame as he was talking to her. She became convinced that he was doing chin-ups in the doorway, and that he was going to wreck the place. She asked me about it every single time I saw her after that.
Congratulations, Mallory! What an exciting time for you.
my two roommates, guy and girl, had a green card marriage. the other girl and i both slept with him, her in a fit of rage and me after i cut a two inch hole in my leg. a dj lived above us and would have parties that began at 3 am on weekdays. one day the guy roommate’s brother showed up, he was a heroin addict. we made them leave eventually. the next male roommate married his girlfriend without telling us and didn’t see why we had a problem with her moving in and not paying rent. water ran in between the walls and the paint so it looked like our walls had tumors. i lived there for three years.
I feel like this should be an indie movie where things are filmed in natural light and everyone laughs and cries in equal measure.
I found my last roommate on Craigslist. We lived in Chicago but had both grown up in Kentucky (but on pretty much opposite sides of the state), which was one of the first things we realized we had in common.
About eight months into living together, we realized that when we were in high school, the man who’d been dating my mom cheated on her with my now-roommate’s aunt. (Something about how the aunt in question saw pictures of me on my roommate’s facebook and recognized my face.) Weirdest coincidence of my life.
i had a showerhead leak drip continously for 3 solid months. 3 months.
the landlord did NOTHING until i sent an email full of pictures of the Giant Mushrooms growing between the tiles. i even took comparison shots with a sneaker between the mushrooms, for scale.
i had a gym, so showers, and brushed my teeth in the kitchen. so it worked. but 3 MONTHS
D:
You have the fortitude of a Valkyrie; I would not have lasted.
i was also working at a TINY nonprofit and my chunk of rent was $450.
so i had incentive 🙂
We had several issues with the plumbing in our apartment and the property manager did nothing. She actually had the gall to say, “Ugh, you’re always complaining about this.” Yeah, because you haven’t fixed it yet. Actually, the problems are still on-going, but on a mild enough level that we don’t think it’s worth it to bring them up again.
A mushroom popped up in our hallway last year! It was a highlight. When I texted my building manager I wrote, “um so…I don’t know if this is your issue or not…but…” and she texted back in all caps, “MUSHROOM”
Oh man it was great. They fixed the pipe though and there haven’t been any new mushrooms since. 🙁
When my friends and I were looking for a place to live for our junior year of college, a girl on our hall whom we didn’t like very much told us she’d found a very affordable apartment in a nice house near campus, so we reluctantly agreed to be roommates with her. SURPRISE, that place fell through and it was too late to tell her that we didn’t actually want to live with her.
We ended up in this AWFUL, AWFUL apartment complex built over a swamp. It reeked of mildew in the summer because the carpets took up all the moisture from the ground. I am 99% the leasing office retroactively changed our lease to a 13-month lease instead of a 12 (though I didn’t have a copy of the original lease that I signed [yes, idiotic of me] so I couldn’t be sure).
The worst part though was that the girl we didn’t even want to live with in the first place was a total mess. It seemed like every day, something horrible happened to her (drug addict parent stole money from her bank account, grandparents cut her off financially, etc.). She had a troubled family, and I sympathized, but it was also hard to feel too bad when we were getting eviction notices every month because she never paid her rent on time, even after she got access to her trust fund (money that she promptly spent on a new car). She also jacked up the heat constantly because she was cold (walking around in shorts and a t-shirt in New England in February) and hoarded dirty dishes in her room.
Fortunately, I was a college student and had only a vague notion of what a shitty living environment it was. I sure hope that’s my rock bottom story, in terms of living situations.
“I had a leaky bathtub faucet for a year and a half once, but it wasn’t causing mold and the water bill was paid by the landlord, so I kinda”
Oh man can I relate to that! If I could redo my Freshman year, I would do everything in my power to get out of my horror roommate situation. But at the time, I was all “My roommate’s right — I am the crazy one living here. And even if I swapped, another girl will probably dislike me more. Or might wake me partying all night!” Really, past ksek? Loud partier roommate would be worse than roommate who complains about you on the phone while you’re in the room?
At our old apartment the people downstairs had a dog that barked for hours every day, morning noon and night. And Weekends. And long into the night. ONCE, at two in the morning, I was taking my husband’s stuff downstairs to see him off for a two-month deployment out of the country. The next morning there was a nasty note shoved under my door about keeping down the noise as people were trying to sleep and also our sex was too loud and frequent. I suppose the nights we lay awake listening to their dog bark for hours didn’t compare to one nigh where we lugged a suitcase around for ten minutes!
Also I had an insane landlady who hated my then-boyfriend now-husband and tried to forbid me from seeing him on account of “I just don’t trust him” when she had admired my previous white boyfriend. And also, she was my landlord, not my mother, so stop telling me about the people I should or shouldn’t see. And her husband took apart a washing machine in my kitchen and left it strewn there in a million parts for days, saying that he would fix it with help from YouTube.
Mallory: get thee a good set of tools, a toilet plunger, thr name of a decent handyman and plumber, and you’ll be fine.
So many things you can fix based on YouTube. About a week ago I repaired a seriously leaking toilet. It required emptying it and replacing parts, all of which I learned to do from 5 minutes on YouTube. I kind of want to be a plumber now.
When I got my first place, my mom got me a great book called “Dare to Repair” (aimed at women with little to no home repair/ plumbing experience). It was written by a couple of Army wives who really knew what they were talking about:
http://www.amazon.com/Dare-Repair-Do-Herself-Anyt…
Highly recommended, especially for plumbing issues. I learned all KINDS of things about toilet tanks.
I have that book! I love that book! I second the recommendation.
Once my roommate and I had put our names and birthdays on the lease, our landlady looked them over and told my roommate, “Oh, you’re a Virgo. You have problems with authority.” Since then, she has always preferred to deal with me in any apartment-related matter.
A month or so after we moved in, we had an infestation of house flies. There were a few small ones at first, but as the days went by, they grew bigger and bigger, and it became clear that they had hatched somewhere inside the apartment. Our landlady instructed us to check the garbage and fridge for rotting food, but there was nothing there. After enduring the Amityville Horror-esque environment for another day, she finally sent someone to deal with the flies. She was intentionally vague about what the exterminator had found as the source of the maggots, and would only say that it was something the previous tenants had left behind. To this day, I wonder what it was.
Congrats on your house!
That… will bother me very much for probably the rest of today.
*shudder*
Did your Virgo friend actually have problems with authority?
No, but that didn’t endear her to him! Self-fulfilling astrological stereotypes …
“I’m a Scorpio. People tend to just give me money… <dramatic pause and raised eyebrows>”
My ex’s first flat got an infestation of those tiny midgey-type flies and all of them (three boys) claimed total ignorance of where they could possibly be coming from. I went to visit, followed the flies with my eyes for about three seconds, and found a bowl of now-liquid potatoes that one of them had half-heartedly hidden behind one roll of kitchen towel. The stench was impressive.
The duplex had rats and we found a scorpion under the table.
You’d think the scorpion would have taken care of the rats.
Unrelated, but I listened to a new guy at work mansplain the scorpion and the frog parable to some female co-workers but he kept calling it the scorpion and the fox and I wanted to scream.
That would make a good opening line for a novel.
Friends, I once spent two months in a godforsaken temporary-focused, pet-allowing apartment complex (read: dogs barking EVERY HOUR OF THE NIGHT AND THERE WERE ALWAYS NEW ONES) because my family had tried to move into a house that wasn’t quite built yet.
I know of a couple who could only find houses near frats and graveyards, and another who tried to sell their house and found out later that the buyers dropped by for an unsupervised look-see, and a bunch of renters who spent six months trying to get different vermin out of the house.
Also, this thing on the student rental situation in Boston is always horrifascinating.
My best-worst apartment horror story:
We rented a basement-level condo for two years. About 3 months before we moved out, there started to be some bad plumbing problems. Like weird toilet drainage problems. Like mysterious foul-smelling water backed up into our bathtub problems. Like 4 inches of raw sewage backed up from the outdoor drain into the hallway outside our apartment problems.
It turned out to be an issue with the city line, so nobody’s fault really, just one of those awful things. We made do; the condo board paid for our apartment to be professionally cleaned (twice), we peed at the library across the street, we were moving to NYC anyway so we tried not to think about the plumbing too much.
Then, after we moved all our furniture to NYC and came back to turn our keys over to the landlord, we found this note on the door:
There was dog poop in drain area
Noooooooooooooooooooooo
I assume you did not own dogs, and some inconsiderate asshole let his dog shit in the drain pipes? Ugh how whyyyyyy
our upstairs neighbors were named Chi Chi and bobby, except bobby didn’t really seem to live there and they were some kind of business partners whose business involved buying tvs from like Sam’s club and then selling them to people in white vans on the street outside. They eventually got evicted for not paying rent, and my roommate and I were both home on the day they had to move out. We listend as bobby yelled at Chi Chi for hours about how no one was going to kick him out of his house and they couldn’t do anything about it. The landlord called the police, and when the police went upstairs, they wouldn’t open the door. They stood outside telling them to open the door for like 10 minutes, and when they finally got inside, bobby was nowhere to be found. They searched for like 45 minutes, all the while Chi Chi was begging them to let her stay. The police escorted her outside with her dog and a backpack, and as they stood outside talking to our landlord, BOBBY JUMPED FROM SOMEWHERE ON THE SECOND FLOOR INTO OUR BACKYARD! My roommate and I looked at him, he looked at us, and then he jumped over the fence into the next yard and started climbing the next fence after that. There were probably 20 fences he would need to jump before reaching a street. We went and told the police in the driveway. Then bobby came back and stood in our backyard while talking on a cell phone, looking up at the second story window as if he wanted to get back up there. We stared at him through the window and he went away. Chi chi and bobby turned out to be the quietest upstairs neighbors we had.
ROOMMATE STORY
When I got my first job out of college, I didn’t have a local apartment, and was pretty desperate for a place as I was crashing with a friend who was in the process of splitting from her live-in fiance. I signed a lease with a girl I met online who seemed normal & had lived in the place for a couple years. I figured she had to be financially stable or the landlord wouldn’t have let her resign, right?
WRONG. She never paid rent on time, didn’t pay bills, smoked pot all the time (not a big deal, really, but I don’t smoke and she had told me she was drug-free when I moved in). One weekend she had friends visiting and didn’t tell me they were coming and she literally disappeared for a night – I ended up having complete strangers crash with me because they had no where else to go and she didn’t answer her phone. She brought random dudes over for hook-ups regularly (again, had told me she rarely had overnight guests). I ended up kicking her out after she went two months without paying rent. I tried to get the money from her parents, who co-signed, and her dad threatened me and told me that he was an ex-cop who had had a former roommate arrested for drug use (implying that the roommate had been set-up).
The landlord eventually told me that they had acquired the property that year and that she’d had a history of non-payment, and that they wouldn’t have re-leased to her, but that she’d already signed when they took over management so they couldn’t do anything about it. They did give me the whole deposit back even though it was technically in her name, which was nice. I was too gunshy to try and find a new roommate so I paid for the place on my own the rest of the year, and I’m still trying to recover from it financially. ROOMMATES, man.
I love telling landlord/almost landlord stories! I don’t have any horrific ones, just eccentric and/or rude ones.
In New Orleans, I moved into an apartment which the landlady had only just moved of. She left her curtains, a couch, a bed, and her cat. A few weeks after we moved in she came back while we were at work and took the couch.
The cat was the third meanest cat I ever met. Even I couldn’t love her, and I love all beasts.
The apartment I lived in longest in Philly was owned and maintained by a man who installed all the taps in reverse and all the outlets and switchplates upside down so the lightswitches said NO instead of ON. Over the course of six years he put down a nice deck outside of my 2nd floor unit, added an awning, cut random holes in the deck to try to redirect rainwater, and then tore the whole thing up and put down a squishy roofing material that tracked in little rocks like kitty litter if I walked on it.
I moved out after a water heater burst and the entryway bloomed with red and black mold.
I already told this story on the post I linked the other day (explaining about my One TShirt to Rule them All) but last time I moved, a realtor rented out an apartment that I had already put down a deposit on. I got my deposit back, but dang.
Later I met the tenant they rented it to, and he gave me a tour of the apartment he was moving out of. (I didn’t take it, despite the appealing symmetry.)
I lived in what basically amounted to a sun room for a year. I think it was approximately 10’x10′, had a mantle, and an attached bathroom. We found out midway through winter that the heating ducts just weren’t connected to my room. And the landlords (barely older than us college sophomores, but business majors/real estate moguls) didn’t do a thing to fix it.
This was also the apartment where one night at like 3am water started pouring through our kitchen ceiling light. One of the guys who lived upstairs had yanked his sink out of the wall.
It was a ridiculous year. Fond memories on the whole, though.
Hilary Swank and Chad Lowe sent us a plague of mice.
Living in a West Village 1 bd apt., Hillary Swank and Chad Lowe embarked on a lengthy reno of their townhouse directly behind our building. It upset the critter balance and sent the vermin of the area running into our building.
Seeing as most of the tenants in our building were rent controlled or stabilized, the landlord wasn’t one to do much. Actually they did nothing. “Get a cat” was our advice.
We we forced to leave the glory of rent control (the stove was from the 1930’s and worked more like a beehive oven, the walls were deeply cracked, it was a lead paint hazard).
Hilary and Chad broke up less than a year after the article about their renovated town house appeared in the NY Times. But at least thanks to the article, we finally got to see inside their house.
My old landlord would sit in the ground-level sandwich shop without the lights on and just stare at you as you passed by the front window. Somehow, I found this more creepy than his tendency to be standing in just his tighty-whities at his backdoor, just as you were coming up the basement stairs with your laundry. There was a luxuriously spacious 3′ between the basement door and his door. You can totally glide through that with your big laundry basket without accidentally grazing his big hairy belly……… totally…. no prob………..
These are far from qualifying as horror stories, but my parents have had a bunch of less-than-desirable tenants.
When we bought the house (a duplex) there was a family living in the upstairs unit and their small children used to spend virtually the entire day running around, screaming and just generally making incredible amounts of noise. Their parents always shrugged it off as “They’re kids, they have a right to play in their own home” which… they do… but the other people in the home deserve to enjoy a quiet Sunday afternoon without having to worry that the ceiling might cave in from all the stomping.
They briefly rented the basement suite to two women. One of them was dating a married man who would come over at all hours of the night and wake my parents up, since the basement suite didn’t have a doorbell of its own, and one time the wife came over to yell at the mistress, which was fun. The other one worked as a housekeeper/nanny and was accused by her employers of stealing jewelry; the police came to talk to my parents about her activities and whereabouts, which was also fun.
Then they rented the upstairs unit to a woman and her two teenaged sons. They seemed like perfect tenants at first, but then the cracks started to show. My mother paid the sons to, respectively, mow the lawn and take care of the cat while she was on vacation. She came back to find that not a single blade of grass had been touched, and the cat’s food and water bowls were bone-dry. The son who’d agreed to cat-sit claimed he couldn’t do it because he was allergic to cats, in which case why would you accept employment that required you to take care of a cat. (The cat was an outdoor cat and had other sources of food, so she was alright, but.)
Then when my mom went off to Switzerland to join my dad, she rented the downstairs unit to a bunch of engineering graduate students, and the woman living upstairs started emailing her, alternately saying she wanted to move out (and break her lease) and asking that her rent be lowered, on the grounds that she feared for her safety because of the other tenants and their “constant loud parties.” They’re engineering grad students, they don’t have parties.
The cat from the third paragraph is now living with me and gets fed and watered on a regular basis, so all’s well that ends well.
Once I had a roommate’s-bf who only had 1 pair of pants
Me too! But they were shorts and he wore them all summer without underwear and rarely showered. My friend would withhold sex until he had bathed. I’m fairly certain that he never washed those shorts that season. My favourite story about him was when he was at the university library, doing research for his biostats degree. After a while, the librarian came over and asked him to get his hands out of his shorts (I regret to say that his roommates often had to do this too). She was surprised that he was not watching porn, and was really working on a big important medical study about smoking. His balls got awfully itchy that summer, and scratching them in public was honestly totally unconscious. Now he’s going to be a doctor!
When I was in college, my friends and I lived in a house that was built circa 1950– basically too new to be considered historic, but too old to be, well, rat-proof. We had rats. Not singular rat… multiple rats. They ate entire packages of Oreos, skittered across the kitchen floor, and jumped out of cabinets to attack your face. The battle was constant. It was not uncommon to come into the kitchen and see a roommate kicking the refrigerator yelling “DAMN RAT” and other such niceties. We were worn down to nubs by Christmas break. My normal morning conversation with my roommate was reduced to discussing our fantasies of killing the rats. Needless to say, the fantasies became more and more violent, including more and more machetes … Though soon I was simply dreaming of breaking them with my bare hands. It was a dark place for me.
I was finally fed up by the start of Spring semester. One night I waited until I heard the familiar skittering in the kitchen and I did the typical– burst into the kitchen yelling profanities until the offending rat frantically hid behind the fridge. I wasn’t sure what my plan was, but I was surprised when this time, rather than diving behind the refrigerator, this rat dove behind the oven.
“I can work with this…” the evil voice in my head told me as my depraved hands turned the oven on to full heat. Never once did the smell of burning hair or the sound of pitiful squeaks penetrate the extreme satisfaction I felt.
My packet of Oreos was finally being avenged…
Like I said. It was a dark place for me.
It’s fucked up but I know exactly how you felt.
My first Big Kid Apartment ™ was shared with my then-boyfriend and another couple. The other couple were lovely people, but probably the messiest individuals I have ever lived with. The first time I knew we were going to have trouble was when I pulled open the silverware drawer to get a fork or something, idk, and stuck my hand right into a semi-soft stick of butter.
I brought this up to the other couple and the guy goes “you mean it doesn’t go there?” really earnestly.
They also had an entire mini fridge just for alcohol apparently because they got really mad when I’d put my milk in there.
OMG! This is unbelievable.
TO THINK of someone trying to store silverware in the butter drawer.
Once the glass thing that covers an overhead light (sconce? or does that only apply if they’re on a wall?) fell to the ground and shattered all over the bathroom floor while i was naked and vulnerable in the shower.
My current downstairs neighbors’ only hobbies seem to be slamming doors, terrible techno music, and having yelling/desperate arguments about lying/cheating. I would complain but my apartment is A+ and I love it and hearing a young couple fighting all the time just reassures me that my choice to pledge the Warrior Spinsterhood was the right one.
Your downstairs neighbors should team up with the college kids who are currently my upstairs neighbors. They can have double the crappy techno and also compete to see who can yell drunkenly at 3 AM on a Wednesday about murdering people (MEGAN YOU BIIIIIIITCH I’M GONNA KILL YOOOOOOOU) the most!
Ah! This reminds me of my charming apartment (it was actually reallly charming! I stayed there for 3 years!) where the couple across the hall had screaming/yelling desparate arguments constantly and also apparently a terrible relationship and low self-esteem. I watched A LOT OF TV very LOUDLY while I lived there, and I still learned wayyy too much about their lives
When my husband I bought our apartment, before we were married, in Manhattan, we had what our broker said was the worst closing she had ever seen. And not because of those crazy-making factors.
The first speed bump came when the bank lost our stock and lease, which caused months of delays. When they finally located it, we learned that when we signed the contract with the seller in October, he decided that that was his cue to stop paying the mortgage and maintenance (it’s a coop). Finally, at the end of February, as I am about to leave my office to finally close on the apartment, I get a call from the lawyer telling me not to come. This is when we actually learn that he stopped paying, so now the apartment has gone into foreclosure. So, we are paying rent, paying the bank a daily fee for holding our mortgage rate, and we are paying lawyers. This was a Tuesday. By Thursday, through some miracle, we finally go to the closing. The seller knows we’re in a tight spot, that we lose the rental apartment in two days and the movers are coming Friday. He refuses to pay any of the fees that his awfulness and irresponsibility caused, and proceeded to make fun of me through the closing. Like, openly mocking me. That said, the only moment of unintended hilarity came when I took out a prized fountain pen to sign the documents. He took one look at it and declared “Yo, dawg! Your pen looks like a chisel!” Which has now become the shorthand phrase for all real estate angst. Regardless, we closed relatively smoothly, the movers came and it was 5 years just last month.
And now we own a very tiny corner of the East Village with a garden out back and a dishwasher. If only I could get the endemic mice to pay rent.
Why do people live in New York. Why. WHY.
Well, usually people come here for the combination of access to the arts, culture and amazing one of a kind events that make the city so unique. In my case, it is these things, plus the fact that my family has lived here for 100 years, I have no idea how to live anywhere else, and a bomb-ass job that I love. So all I can do is ask why people live anywhere else. Why. WHY.
CAN I PLAY.
We bought our house this time last year. The vendor was a right pain: tried to make us pay individually for all the fixtures abs fittings, like toilet roll holders and toothbrush holders and stair carpets, and, when we declined, removed them all. Anyway, at a particularly frustrating part of the process, my partner googled her …
And we discovered that she’d been jailed for two years in the early 2000s for ARSON. She’d arranged for two heavies to burn down a mansion (a mansion!) she owned. The crime was discovered when the investigators found out that the two heavies had set the house alarm on the way out, using the PIN.
After that we decided to stop communicating with her except through lawyers.
Why this isn’t a drama by Sally Wainwright, I will never know.
That is ridiculous(ly great).
Once I went to London for a few months and my landlord refused to let me sublet to my bf who basically lived there anyway and had great credit because he’s a 6’5 black man but allowed a sublease to a white male student found on Craigslist sight unseen.
We had weird and terrible landlords in my first-ever apartment– this sweet but useless older guy named Mike and an evil woman named Nicole who occasionally claimed to be his daughter but we had reason to believe was not. So, we were pretty sure that they would try and cheat us out of our security deposit when we moved, so we asked my friend’s Mom, was who a guarantor, to be there when the landlords did the walk-though so they wouldn’t just think we were 20-year-olds they could cheat.
So my friend’s Mom called Nicole to tell her she would be there for the walk-through. A few minutes later, we get a call from Nicole: As our lease technically expires at midnight, she expects us to move out AT midnight. We had a U-haul rented for the next morning, and it was around 6pm. We didn’t know what else we could do, so we scrambled and found a Uhaul right away and started packing. Around 11pm, Nicole and three other random women pulled up in a car, and just sat in it, shining their headlights into the back of our Uhaul. Occasionally Nicole would get out and observe the moving process and remind us that we had to be out by midnight or we’d be in violation of the lease.
Finally, my friend finally lost his temper and started yelling (from about 10 feet away from her, this is important) that we couldn’t possibly move with her getting in our way like this. Nicole said “I think I’m going to need to call the police, because I’m a woman, and he’s trying to beat me”. He was TEN FEET FROM HER. We packed the rest of our stuff in the truck and got the hell out of there. I passed Mike on the street a few years later and literally ran away as fast as I could.
i think you win. that is horrible.
Thank you, but I feel certain you will no longer feel I’m the winner once you get to the meth story on page 2.
that story 0_0
And a shorter one: one time I came home to find that one of my roommates had broken a mirror in a rage because her boyfriend got Netflix and Netflix was Her Thing.
what
Indeed.
????
The responses on this thread are a perfect description of my state of mind every day I lived in that apartment.
She also borrowed about $200 from each of us when we moved in to be able to pay the deposit (because we were all BEST FRIENDS and of course you can trust your best friends to pay you back, right?? Oh god 20 year olds are idiots). Then she would periodically cry and explain how upset she was that she still couldn’t afford to pay us back. Then the next day she would come home with a new tattoo.
I seriously lived with the 35-yr old version of that person. It wasn’t any better, just weirder.
That was how I learned that some people just Cannot. Understand. Money. Their decisions will always be based on preferences and emotions, not on, yknow, counting. I truly believe that this girl thought she could not afford to pay us back, because her tattoos were things she was getting for Emotionally Important Reasons and the Emotionally Important Tattoo budget is a separate budget from the Weed budget which is separate from the Paying People Back budget, which is not a budget that ever has any money it. She is not the only person I know who is this way, and I don’t think any of them are bad people. However, my rule for lending friends money now is “NEVER unless I have enough to consider it a gift and be pleasantly surprised if I get it back”
EDIT: I wrote way too much. In the last year:
Getting kicked out since landlord is selling: end up as a couple in a studio, mice coming out of a floor gap UNDER MY BED. Floor gap is there because landlord knocked down a wall and build a headboard shelf / over it. Take out drawers to fill in gap and clean up mounds of mouse shit, realize still holes in the kitchen and tons more shit. Break dishwasher filling holes. Outlet exploded and power goes out losing a new fridge of groceries, AC didn’t work (DC summer), brown banded cockroaches coming our of a hole in crown molding, broken bathroom door that won’t shut on its own…
And we signed an 18 month lease :/
Two apartments ago I lived in a basement and had: weird worm things that crawled out of the baseboards, spider crickets, two dachshunds that lives upstairs and barked for hours and hours, car break in and car vandalism, and then a neighbor who got shot in his car one night.
Three apartments ago I was in the first floor apt and a block in the sewage line further down sent disgusting water back up through my sink, leading me to have to continually empty it. The building wouldn’t take ownership until the plumber I had to find proved how far down the clog was.
When my dad got married, there was a gap between when we sold our house and when we moved into the new place, so we rented a house from some people in our neighborhood who were going to go live in a treehouse in SE Asia. They had a toddler who ran around naked all the time and peed on the floor, and the house tried to kill us with carbon monoxide poisoning.
My stepmom had the same issue with the gap between houses, but she had to live in a tiny dark one-bedroom apartment with two kids and a dog, which may actually have been worse?
The first apartment I lived in after the dorms was in an absolutely gorgeous old building with a dark, creepy basement, and the laundry was behind a heavy, dark green door, which I guess used to say “paint room” but somebody scraped the T off, so it said PAIN ROOM. (Also the onsite manager was super into me and not great with boundaries, so that was stressful).
I also lived in an apartment that tried to kill us with CO poisoning – at the time we didn’t know what was making us sick, and I definitely would have died if I hadn’t somehow managed to call a friend to take me to the ER. Then later, after I moved out, the building burned down. Luckily no one was home at the time and the neighboring houses were unaffected. The ceiling caved in during the fire and exposed a GIANT mouse nest that had been in the walls. The mice probably escaped – they were pros.
This all sounds terrible, but it was a great place and I loved my roommates so overall it was one of the better living situations I’ve had!
The couple across the hall had some kind of horrible illegal daycare-slash-puppy farm thing going on and it stank. It smelled so very, very bad. My very nice landlord told me they basically destroyed the apartment and he wouldn’t be able to rent it maybe ever.
Actually, terrible housing stories of my 20s is my planned book.
I had a handyman in Chicago who on my first day of moving in, living alone, came over to give me my laundry key and looked me slowly up and down and said, “You got yourself a nice body and you know how to take care of it. Don’t be mad!” I tried to never talk to him again but one January night, I locked myself out and it was either die in the snow or talk to him. He refused until I gave him $20.
I lived with a group of male pedicabbers who once had a party where they set fire to a junked SUV. One of them decided he wanted to live off grid but in his backyard (he owned the house), so he bought a shipping container off of eBay. He drew up endless designs and plans but ultimately, just slept on a dirty mattress in a shipping container. By June, the heat in Austin was bad enough that toxic chemicals were being released from the paint and he started puking every day. He never did convert the container, blaming ultimately a failed Kickstarter campaign to do so.
This guy also got laid. A LOT. One time, I was waiting for my dad to pick me up and I look out over the porch, and see my dad pulling up in his car and then a look in the yard, and see two naked, entangled bodies in an unzipped pup-tent, 10 feet away from me, 10 feet away from my incoming father. “STAY THERE.” I yelled. “DO NOT WALK CLOSER, I’M GOOD, LET’S GO, LET’S GO TO YOUR CAR NOW OKAY. OKAY.”
This is my favorite story. This one right here. I didn’t know I was picking a favorite till I got to this one.
“He never did convert the container, blaming ultimately a failed Kickstarter campaign to do so”.
I think this might be my favorite sentence of all time.
when i first moved to philadelphia with one of my college friends, she went a few weeks ahead to stay with family and find us an apartment- and she found one! totally beautiful, way out of our budget, cost too much to heat, but wow, it was beautiful and convenient and the landlord was nice, so obviously we had to leave after our lease was up.
AND FINDING THE NEXT APARTMENT CAME TO ME. IT FELL. TO ME.
and i found an apartment on the third floor of the shittiest house on a really nice street. i didn’t notice the stairs were crooked. i ignored the (now obvious) mouse holes in the hallway leading to our door. i didn’t mind that THREE COLLEGE-AGED BOYS were living in the apartment and moving out shortly, and that the room three of them shared was a nightmare of stiff draped sheets and looseleaf (WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH THAT LOOSELEAF.) i was assured the apartment would be cleaned and repainted before we moved in! the price was pretty great! the two bedrooms were a good size! my roommate came with me on a second viewing and agreed that the rent/location was great. bc we’re friends, she didn’t shake me by the shoulders and scream into my face that we were clearly about to embark on a nightmare. i mean, they were going to paint!! it would be ok!
THEN WE MOVED IN and discovered a leak under the kitchen sink which the boys before us soaked up with used domino’s pizza boxes. pizza boxes they left there for us to find with a roach colony that really loved their old pizza and cardboard home. we found holes in the walls between the kitchen and my bedroom where at least two mice got through to my room (THAT I NOTICED). and the holes behind the oven where there was another Roach Situation we spent the first two months dealing with. and then it was autumn and rainy and the ceiling began to leak everywhere. MOSQUITOES STARTED BREEDING IN MY BEDROOM CEILING. in my last week in the apartment (my roommate got a job in another state after 4 mos and fled), there was a hornet in the bathroom that i could hear buzzing from my bedroom down the hall. i’m sure there was nothing i needed there.
she’s still my friend!! my very close friend!! her workplace was fumigated with floral-scented poison a few months ago and she called to say “they didn’t tell me they were fumigating and i inhaled the fumes for longer than i should have and thought of you.” anyway please canonize my friend
My first apartment was ABOVE a cheese store and I could walk to a library, taco place, Thai restaurant, 7-11 and coffee shop in under 2 minutes. It even came with a flatscreen TV and parking space. It also came with a super creepy building manager that gave me the creeps the second I met him but since I was 21 I wasn’t wise enough to listen to my gut about creeps yet.
Anyhoo…the building manager was moving out of the unit I was renting into the unit down the hall. His peep hole directly faced the building’s back door to the parking lot so he could see whoever came in and out. For the most part, I would usually be coming or going with my boyfriend in tow. One time my boyfriend went out of town and I came home alone from work. Within 5 minutes of me coming home, the building manager had just walked up to my apartment, opened the door and walked in and when I yelled “EXCUSE ME!?!?” he claimed to have been confused and on autopilot since he used to live in my unit. “An honest mistake,” he said. After that I was a PSYCHO about locking my door.
Fast forward a couple weeks, my boyfriend was sick so stayed at my place while I went to work. When I got home that evening I appeared to be alone. Out of habit, I deadbolted the door as soon as I came in. Five minutes later, I didn’t hear anything but apparently my boyfriend heard someone jiggling the doorknob. He ran to the door, threw it open and caught the building manager slinking away from the door. He got so worked up he also started shouting the many ways he was going to harm the man in Italian (my boyfriend at the time was Italian, btw).
During the Italian hallway showdown, the dude then had the nerve to accuse me of neglecting to tell him I had a boyfriend and that I couldn’t have “overnight guests” in my apartment for insurance reasons (it said nothing of the sort in my lease). I called the cops on him who said they couldn’t do anything but were happy to knock on his door and appear scary and mean to deter him from pulling a stunt like that in the future. My father also had some stern words with the man and the building management company and also reminded them that he was the owner of a shotgun. I eventually moved out a few months later when I broke up with the BF and got sick of being afraid to come home.
A year later I got a Linked In request from the building manager. Fun times!
My worst roommate (and I truly count myself lucky that this is the worst roommate I’ve ever dealt with, if you don’t count my cat) hoarded dishes to such a degree that, when she was out of town over the summer and we were asked by our landlord to move a few things in her room, we found two boxes and a tote bag overflowing with dirty dishes. Some of them had been “missing” for more than 8 months.
Like, I am gross, but that is GROSS. And they were literally hidden, not just strewn about as a product of her laziness. Stacked in boxes. What was she going to do with them??
Cats are TERRIBLE roommates, let’s be honest.
I’m constantly cleaning up his shit, and he NEVER pays rent.
And they throw up in your shoes, on top of all of the rest of it.
Oh Lord, my worst roommate didn’t clean his room ever and the one time he did because he was having his 37-year-old not-girlfriend over, he picked up all the trash in his room and bagged it up and put it in his closet because he was too lazy to walk down the hall to the trash chute.
My college roommate once discovered that her cat had been using the floor of her closet instead of his litterbox – several months after he had started doing so. We lost part of our security deposit because of the number of times they had to clean the carpet.
This is partly explained by the fact that she wasn’t actually sleeping in her room (…she was sleeping in mine, which was its own level of crazy), but still, how do you not notice several months of cat box IN YOUR CLOSET WHERE YOUR CLOTHES ARE.
?!??!?!?!?!
That is distressing on so many levels.
Was she just assuming that the cat had trained itself to use the toilet and that’s why the litterbox was always pristine?
Well, I also had a cat, so the litterbox was not actually pristine. And she went through a phase where cleaning the litterbox made her throw up (yeahhhh), so usually I cleaned it.
A not-awesome roommate of mine was once discovered to have put his dirty dishes in his dresser drawers. Where his clothes lived. They were covered in pancake syrup. This still makes me laugh. The same dude spread sugar aaaaaallllllllllll over his kitchen cabinets, which turned out to not help our ant situation at all. And once I was gone for several weeks, and he put his leftovers in my good mixing bowls, then left them in the fridge until they molded over. But still, the dishes in the bureau is my favorite.
Oh my god this happened to me too! Except he didn’t hoard dishes, he hoarded something much worse……..
He would occasionally keep a couple plates or glasses in his room, and I would swing through every time I was about to run the dishwasher (I had a dishwasher in NYC. I weep for those halcyon days.) to grab them. He did not mind this, or did not say anything if he did. I knew his room was messy and there was a slightly musty (*or something*) smell in his room, but he kept the door closed and the windows in his room open 24-7, so it was passable.
Then one weekend he went out of town, and I let my morbid curiosity and instinct for self-preservation take over. I put on gloves, a scarf around my mouth and nose, rainboots, and armed myself with trashbags… I took out TWENTY BAGS OF TRASH. Takeout containers, McDonalds bags… I didn’t know beer could mold until that day, and I went to a party school. It was really awful.
Twenty bags.
I concocted a story about “oops I got drunk and went overboard, sorry!” half-assed apology that he did not believe, and said “Unnecessary.” DUDE IT WAS NECESSARY. You had MOLD growing in your room. This is a health hazard.
I HAD A ROOMMATE WHO DID THIS. She always claimed she didn’t know where our missing bowls were (and bc it was a random roommate assignment in college, we all had our own bowls and didn’t share), but then she went out of town and left her door wide open (this never happened), and we peaked in and literally every surface (including her bed) and also the entire floor was covered in dishes, bowls (including our missing ones) and various paper towels/empty food containers.
omg reading these replies is so cathartic. i thought i was the only one who dealt with this weirdness/grossness overlap. i had a roommate in college (lovely person, really) who hoarded dirty dishes and uneaten food in her room. I would periodically go in to remove cereal bowls of rotten milk and cans of peaches. It was foul. I thought it couldn’t get worse but it did. I moved out, but came back to visit about 3 months later. This girl had made a nest on the couch and had half her stuff in the living room. When i asked her what was going on, she said my old room was full of her stuff now and she didn’t go in her room anymore because of the smell. I thought it was super weird, but I let it go and just slept at another friend’s place instead. Six months AFTER THAT I came back to help her move out. Omfg. We found so much rotten food and the kicker was we found THREE DEAD MICE that had apparently been crushed to death by falling clutter at DIFFERENT TIMES.
We were in the process of selling our house in rural Georgia to a guy on military disability with a morphine pump in his stomach. One day my young daughter and I came home from the grocery store to find a long handwritten letter from him on a legal pad that was on my desk. He wrote that he’d come in through an unlocked window to look around, and he was wondering if we could leave all the canned goods that were in our pantry. He also wrote that our dog seemed to be getting used to him, “haha.” (Our dog was an extremely protective 110-pound German Shepherd mix, and I hate to think how our buyer got past him.)
A couple weeks later, something went wrong with the deal (I forget what it was), and we told him the deal was off and we weren’t selling our house to him. My husband was out of town on business. That night, I’d just put our daughter to bed when I noticed a souped-up truck that, at least in the dark, very much resembled our buyer’s car idling on the gravel road in front of the house. (This, again, is way out in the country.) The driver revved the engine a few times, drove past, turned the truck around so the headlights were shining directly in our windows, idled like that for a few minutes, revved the engine some more, drove slowly past again, and so on, at least half a dozen times. In the middle of this, I got an email from our realtor saying that he’d just heard from the buyer’s realtor, who said she’d just heard from the buyer and that he was “in a distressed state.” I called the police for the first and—so far—only time in my life.
oh my god
“something went wrong with the deal” AFTER he BROKE INTO YOUR HOUSE
Ha, yes, you’d think that would’ve been our tipping point, but this was just after the real estate crash and we felt lucky to have an interested party.
HOW IS THAT THE END OF THAT STORY? I guess he just drove away before the police got there or… murdered you before you could finish writing the rest of the story.
Police did a drive-by and scared him off. We did end up selling the house to him. As soon as he moved in, he cut down the century-old magnolia in the front yard and parked about a half-dozen trailers, campers, and other vehicles including a M*A*S*H-style jeep where our vegetable garden used to be.
Congratulations! Welcome to the world of house payments that slowly creep up (due to adjusted real estate taxes, ever-changing property insurance, some mistake somebody made about escrow, etc.), things that break off right when you were about to go away for the weekend, secret termites, and impossible-to-locate roof leaks. It’s an exciting and fun-filled world! So long as you don’t enjoy ever having any spare money again.
You shouldn’t rush out and buy anything, except maybe paint (assuming you have a bed of some kind and maybe a chair or something). This will save you regret that you spent your last disposable income ever on something that, on second thought, does not actually go with the new house at all.
Seriously though, good luck.
Instead of buying stuff, my advice would be to start putting aside money every month for house stuff. Even if none of the problems lemonadefish mentioned happen, a house is still likely be full of things that will need replacing every few decades: roof, water heater, furnace, appliances, siding, weeping tile, etc. And unless it’s a brand new house, those things probably weren’t all just replaced, so they’ll already be on their way to wearing out and needing replacement.
Oh yes, very much so! My Home Repairs savings account is one of my most generously-funded accounts (I have a complex system of bank accounts. I enjoy having specific money for specific things.)
I am delighted for Mallory. I would also like to share this poem:
The People Upstairs, by Ogden Nash
The people upstairs all practise ballet
Their living room is a bowling alley
Their bedroom is full of conducted tours.
Their radio is louder than yours,
They celebrate week-ends all the week.
When they take a shower, your ceilings leak.
They try to get their parties to mix
By supplying their guests with Pogo sticks,
And when their fun at last abates,
They go to the bathroom on roller skates.
I would love the people upstairs wondrous
If instead of above us, they just lived under us.
(Ogden Nash is one of the inmates of my smallish pantheon of “Twentieth Century White American Man Writers Who Deserve All the Fuss Made About Them and Then Some.”)
Ogden Nash is the best! I’ve been obsessed with him my whole life practically and I love running into other fans as we seem to be so far and few in between. People best recognize!
My previous roommates and I had cats. One of the roommates HAD TO BE THE ONE TO FEED THE CATS (I think it made her feel special?) and she went through a phase where she would sing the “dinner time” song to them while feeding them. This consisted of singing the words “dinner time, dinner time, dinner time, dinner time…” over and over for a while.
Now that I live alone (with my own two cats), I really appreciate that I can feed them in companionable silence.
Granted, I’m not a criminal lawyer, but I’m 99% sure that would be justifiable homicide.
My next-to-last apartment was flooded when the tenant above me left his toilet running all day, the next tenants played music loudly, hammered nails into the wall at 10 PM a few times, vacuumed the carpet twice a day, and, like clockwork, did a load of laundry every single evening at 11PM. Then the wheels were stolen from my car, not just the tires but the WHOLE WHEEL.
Then the upstairs neighbors got a dog and made it stay on the balcony, presumably because they didn’t want it messing up their freshly-vacuumed carpet, and NEVER TOOK IT FOR A WALK and the balcony was made of SLATS and ALL THE DOG CRAP RAINED DOWN UPON MY PATIO which I didn’t notice for a few weeks because I never opened the blinds or went outside that way (my computer was in view of the window and by then I was getting paranoid about house robbery, due to my car).
After that there was a leak in the ceiling above my bathtub that only leaked when they were taking a shower upstairs and the apartment maintenance guys NEVER TURNED THE SHOWER ON TO CHECK and claimed there was no leak until I took a photo of the GIANT LEAKING BUBBLE OF CEILING PLASTER and shoved it in the face of one of the managers.
When my lease finally ended, they didn’t give me my pet deposit back but I was so happy to be out of there, I didn’t care. (They didn’t give the security deposit back either, but I first rented when it was owned by a different management company and instead of a deposit, you bought a $25 bond from some random, probably shady, company that put the deposit down, and they’d somehow lost all records of that and assumed I paid a full deposit. I didn’t enlighten them while I was living there, on the off chance that they’d make me pay a full deposit.)
Anyway we now own a house, and while the soil on one side is eroding too much so our house, if we don’t get the retaining wall built higher this year, will eventually fall on top of the neighboring house, IT IS SO MUCH BETTER.
I once lived on the “lower ground floor” (eh, the basement, let’s not be fancy, because it wasn’t) of a Georgian house and had spent a very frustrating evening & night dealing with leaky ceilings in my kitchen and bedroom. Went to work having left many messages for my landlord, came home, emptied buckets and basins, mopped around them, threw yet more soakage material on the floors.
Fumed. Made coffee. Sat down to drink it.
And then the kitchen ceiling fell in.
Rivers of murk poured down.
There was a step down into the kitchen and the water rose up to meet it, gobbets of plaster floating on the surface.
I panicked, tried to turn bath towels and bedding into sandbags and frantically moved anything electronic that wasn’t already in the water out of the way.
The water tank waaaaaaaaaay up at the top of the house had (literally) burst, and alllllllllllllll the water had rushed downward, taking little soujourns on each floor (and between the floors) to regroup for the final assault. On me. Somehow, my place got the worst of it.
That may be down to physics or to the extreme lack of maintenance on the house. Whichever, it was not fun.
Because of having lived (there are more stories, this is just the best/worst) I am the most low-maintenance tenant in the world.
There is natural light in the daytime? Amazing! The ceiling won’t cave in? Most excellent! There is heating? The luxury!
The first summer I lived in my current apartment I typically slept with the bedroom window partway open. One night at about 3AM I woke to the sound of my blinds rustling. In my half-asleep delirium I saw the shadow of something flying through the air and was out of it enough that I assumed it was a large moth and went back to sleep and forgot about it. The next night it happened again and this time I woke up all the way and realized that it had not been a moth but a BAT. It had spent the whole day hanging in my window between the glass and the screen, and resumed flying around my bedroom that night.
I flipped the fuck out and grabbed everything I would need for the next day, shut the bedroom door and then watched Youtube videos of people chasing bats out of their houses for a while before leaving a voicemail for my building manager and going to sleep on the couch. Somebody from the building came by while I was at work the next day and got rid of the bat (which had gotten in because the window screen was coming out of the frame, leaving a crack). They claimed they fixed the screen too, but within two days it was broken again. They came back another two times to fix it and failed both times so I just gave up and vowed never to open that window again.
While that was all going down, I consulted the internet and eventually an IRL doctor and learned that it is possible for a bat to bite you in your sleep and you would never know because the bites are tiny and painless, and apparently bat bites are the only way anybody gets rabies nowadays. So I had to go for a course of five rabies shots over the next couple months which even with insurance ended up costing about $1,000. I politely requested a reduction in rent since the broken screen was the building’s responsibility but they claimed that I must have broken it myself and refused.
The dumbest thing about this story is that I still live in that apartment four years later. But it’s a nice apartment when there aren’t bats in it!
I should mention that I live in Chicago, not out in the country so bats REALLY should not be a concern.
This almost exact scenario happened to me! Except the bat didn’t come in through my window but through the crack between my bedroom door and the floor. (It was an old, old apartment with lots of…cracks.)
BUT, I dreamed that there was a butterfly in my room and then I woke up and it was A BAT. And I screamed and opened my window and it flew out, miraculously. I told the landlord, and I think he said something to the effect of “Yea it probably came in through a window. Thanks for letting me know.” I also had to get the course of rabies shots, and it was miserable. Luckily, this was in Minnesota and the people in the ER were totally like “Oh yeah another bat bite, typical day.”
But, the rent was cheap as hell, and it was within walking distance of school, and no other horrible things happened, so I stayed there for another year!
Hmmm, I would say that a few things drastically improved our nascent home-ownership experience:
-More Command hooks than you’ll think you’ll need
-A basic, YouTube-taught knowledge of doing simple electrical work like changing or installing new light switches
-Added shelving
-Light timers. Light timers for everything
-If it’s not labeled already, spend about 30 minutes with a friend on a cell phone figuring out which outlets are controlled by all the various breakers in your breaker box and label them with a sharpie. This will make it a bajillion times easier to do electrical work without having to reset every clock in the house and force any co-habiters to go without electricity while you mess about with wiring.
Hooks and shelves always for everything. Always.
Oh yes, labeling the breaker box is key. Also “having a friend who knows how to fix things,” although in that case it is my fiancee. I would have continued living in condos with maintenance staff forever if not for him.
Repairs my parents avoided for most of my childhood:
1) Leak in airing cupboard. Fixed by ‘putting a welly under it’. Finally looked at when water came through to the sitting room, threatening the television.
2) Leak over extension roof. Ignored because ‘it only leaks when it’s windy!’. Fixed when kitchen roof came in.
3) Central heating/boiler breakdown. Never fixed. (“just put a jumper on!”)
4) Upstairs lights in various rooms no longer working. Never fixed.
5) Damp.
6) Garage roof collapse. Fixed by not letting anyone in the garage anymore.
In conclusion – get stuff fixed when it breaks or your house will fall down.
Landlady at my most horrible (really not THAT horrible) grad student apartment, when I ask about roaches and whether the management company has a contract with an exterminator: “Well, it’s Texas. You’re gonna have a few water bugs.” That was the year I got over being deathly afraid of roaches by being more afraid of Raid fumes.
Don’t buy anything for the house until you’ve had a housewarming party, because people will give you gift cards for Home Depot and Lowe’s.
Well, when you live in the south, you DO kind of have to get used to roaches. My first summer in New Orleans, I made the mistake of leaving the window open while I was reading next to it and a cockroach FLEW INTO MY FACE.
No ma’am. I live in Texas and we very rarely have roaches in our house (maybe one or two a year) because Terminex sprays the fuck out of our perimeter every quarter.
Tools to buy:
Crow bar – You’re gonna need it eventually for some weird thing, and it is something only criminals and homeowners own.
A good set of wrenches for the minor plumbing issues that will appear and you can fix without calling a plumber.
Extra towels – good to have on hand for random spills related to plumbing issues mentioned above.
A good hose and sprayer for the yard.
A puuuuuppppy! Get a puppy! Puppy puppy puppy!
oh man, my last landlord and one of my roommates were terrible. I moved into a large house with 4 other people, mostly because I had no other options and it was bad. The house was old and in a place that was super mossy and in the PNW it rains a lot so it was basically mold city. I moved into a dirty house because three people left but two people stayed and it didn’t get cleaned at all. I cleaned the bathroom the first night I was there because the toilet was brown inside. Our landlord was a cheap weirdo who tried to fix things himself but it didn’t really work. The fridge was from the 70’s (it looked like) and he ‘fixed’ the broken shelves first with duct tape, then when we complained he put bungie cords in there and was all proud. We eventually got him to buy a new fridge after months of complaining. He said he would do yard work but never did, we had a huge tree in the front yard that lost all its leaves which turned into mush in our yard and our deck and was probably destroying the foundation. Also, in the fall a branch from that tree broke off and shattered the back windshield of my car and dented it. When i finally moved out there was mildew under my bed because I lived in the redone basement. Also, when he was giving tours to people near the end of our lease, he asked me in front of them if I liked living there and I wanted to be like NO I HATE IT but I just paused for a long time and was like…. mmhm. AND he took 100$ from each of our deposits for general cleaning stuff BUT HE NEVER CLEANED EVER.
Now for the roommate. She was messy and inconsiderate. She straight up lied to us and didn’t pay her bills even though she had the money from her parents. She took cups and bowls into her room and eventually my other roommate went down to get them, had to take multiple trips, and there was an inch of mold in all of the mugs including my favorite one which I then took into my room for safety. She never cleaned her dishes to the point of things growing in them in the sink, and often denied that they were hers at all. She also had loud sex that I heard when trying to do homework. And I’m pretty sure her boyfriend took one of my to-go mugs from the kitchen and kept it. Also she never cleaned her super long hair out of the shower, and it was very obviously hers because we all had short hair. Oh yeah and most of my 4 roommates had significant others so the house had like 8 people in it often. It was terrible. I was really depressed that winter. But I moved into a clean studio apartment and I’m so much happier.
OH i forgot to add that one time, when our upstairs toilet flooded, the landlord’s wife came over to try to fix it (???) and she ended up not being able to and she grabbed the towels that my roommates used for showering and sopped up all the water then threw the towels in the shower all wet and gross and left!! What the hell lady!!? So rude.
I lived in an apartment complex in Costa Mesa (sketchy part of Orange County, CA) where there was a stalker/tire slashing situation going on with a neighbor (the stalkee was a guy, and it was over a girl, but it was still terrifying) and also some people who by all appearances were in the porn industry. Them, I enjoyed running into, though because the outfits were fantastic. Plus it was like a window on a whole world radically different than mine and it filled me with glee because rich tapestry.
Right now I have neighbors above me who practice drums from around 11 pm to 1 am at least thrice weekly. I haven’t decided if that’s better or worse than the guy who lived above me in college and practiced “Free Fallin'” constantly.
Our downstairs neighbor has frequent loud parties at which he blasts (on repeat) what can only be a Mid-90s College Rock Spotify playlist. And then bangs on the ceiling if my toddler wakes him up the next morning crying.
I have a great rental horror story. Moved into a ground-level BK apartment flanked by vacant units, which should have been a warning. About a month later, a steampipe starts leaking in the middle of the night, causing massive water damage to the walls. They had to rip out part of the floor to fix it and left a hole for a month. Not the best, whatever.
A very pretty woman moves into the studio to the right. Every weekend, she brings men home and sings to them until the wee hours. She’s got a nice voice. Fine. Several months later, a lanky, surly man shows up and she introduces him as her husband. A few weeks later, they get into a massive, screaming fight, and the police carry her off (and place her in psych hold, according to another neighbor).
Here’s where things get dicey: She sends someone from building management to get her things from her apartment. They break into MY window to access it. Realize their mistake, leave, don’t actually tell me about it (again, I hear from another neighbor). The husband (“husband”) continues to live in the studio apartment.
He is a pimp.
He has 2-3 women operating out of the apartment at any given time, and a teenage boy in the hallway standing watch. The pimp himself stands outside the building to solicit clientele.
He got busted after a month or so, but I have never been so glad to move out of anywhere. The building burned down about a year later because it got struck by lightning.
Also, my last landlord once let himself into my apartment when I was out because my dog was barking, without trying to call me first. The next morning I found half a Benadryl stuck to the dog’s fur, which he had tracked up/possibly tried to feed her.
I could write a whole story about my first ever on-my-own apartment. Short version: I complained when the landlord locked off the fire escape. He responded by telling me he was taking back my storage space in the basement and get my stuff or he would evict me. I responded by calling the fire department who cam and reamed him out for the fire escape, amongst other shit that was not up to fire safety regulation. Eventually shit calms down, flash forward two years later…
I wake up early one morning to the smell of smoke. It was pouring out of the wall where it joined with a windowsill in my living room. Electrical fire in the walls. I woke up the house to get them out & to call 911, but I went back up to uselessly brandish the fire extinguisher, until some dude came and made me get out. I was wearing nothing but a bathrobe. My apartment was destroyed, I had nowhere to live and my landlord refused to acknowledge I existed. He would literally turn around and run away if he saw me coming.
Ahhhhh an electrical fire in the walls is on my worst nightmares, I’m so sorry.
That’s horrible!!
We had one neighbor who would smoke fish in his truck, using an open flame and a stove he made out of tin cans. *With the engine running*. We called the fire department to have a little chat with him about fire safety.
(This was in a separate house, not an apartment building, but the houses were maybe 7 or 8 feet away from each other).
The story of how I got into this hellhole is long and boring and involves your typical early twenties bad romantic decisions – but all that matters is that I was living in a duplex that was the second story of a hundred year old house. It was a terrible neighborhood. My downstairs neighbors were carnies. There was a coffee factory down the street so everything smelled like burnt coffee. But the rent was right and it was just a few minutes from downtown. I was young, and poor, and full of the wrong priorities, so instead of simply moving furniture being stored in my parents house I slept on a futon mattress on the floor of the bedroom, never cooked, and ignored the other two rooms of the house.
After a few weeks, I started feeling terrible all the time. I was manic for days, and then would crash and be suicidal, unable to get out of bed, just so lethargic and terrible and miserable. I started having terrible rashes, I was itchy all the time, I lost my sense of smell and taste, my hair started falling out, I was breaking out in cystic acne all over my body, a total wreck mentally and physically. I thought maybe I had developed an allergy, so my mom paid out of pocket for me to have extensive testing done, sent me to specialist after specialist, I started seeing a therapist and was nearly diagnosed as bipolar…
Until the day the cops busted the downstairs neighbors for making meth. In their kitchen, that was underneath my bedroom. The stove, in fact, was directly under my little mattress on the floor. I was getting high as a kite on meth when they were cooking it, and then detoxing when they weren’t and spending all of my time rolling around on a mattress that was soaked in it.
Hope you thoroughly investigated whether or not your home was used as a meth lab. Good luck!
OH MY GOD YOU WIN. YOU HAVE WON FOREVER. I am so sorry that happened to you. WTF.
THANK YOU. Anytime anyone complains to me about their real estate situation I am just like BE THANKFUL YOU ARE NOT SLEEPING ON A BED OF METH so now no one wants to talk to me anymore.
Holy shit.
OH MY GOD
You win!!!
Jesus.
WE HAVE THE UNCONTESTED WINNER YOU GUYS.
Holy shit. I don’t even know whom you sue for “giving me an involuntary meth addiction” but I’m pretty sure it’s, like, everyone. Everyone in the whole world.
*awed* I think the thread is over now.
Except I want to know more. How did you get out? Did the downstairs neighbors get their due comeuppance?
Well, they definitely went to jail, so that’s good I guess?
At that point I was in such horrible shape that I wasn’t capable of much. Hurricane Ike had just messed up the city pretty bad, and the boyfriend who I had been living with at this place got sent to jail for a ridiculous probation violation. (Did you know if you have to evacuate a city, but can’t notify your probation officer because there’s no power at the office, you will still totally get arrested?) Being 21 and dumb but also ridiculously hot (meth makes you so thin!) I took up with another dude and went and stayed with him while that apartment was remediated.
Then it turned out that that guy was a heroin addict so that was REALLY GREAT. At the same time I was also seeing this other guy who was a right-wing but job, and his best friend introduced me to another really cute guy who was about to move to Dallas. We had what should have by all accounts been a one night stand, but I really liked him, and my apartment was a meth-drenched hellhole, and the heroin addict had gotten in a scooter accident on his way to score and had a compound fracture and was hospitalized so I felt compelled to visit him daily but it was REALLY bumming me out, so I told this cute guy that if he moved to Austin instead of Dallas, I would move with him. For some totally insane reason he said yes*, and seven years later, we have been married for four years, live a totally normal, meth- and heroin-free life, and have the most perfect tiny little baby. And if she ever asks how we met, I will just say …ask me again in 20 years.
* – our first roommates when we moved to Austin? Heroin addicts! HAHAHA I WISH I WAS MAKING THIS UP
I am so glad this story has a super happy ending. Oh man.
Thank you! I’m so glad this story has a happy ending. But good grief, all the rest of the story!
I was once spent a year living with a Free Jazz enthusiast.
so my horrible rental story involves me inadvertently becoming a meth head but NOPE THIS IS WORSE
My worst apartment horror story is the time I was just a little bit too jet-lagged to ask the property manager of the gigantic apartment complex if there were any vacancies that didn’t overlook the freight rail yard. I’m 99% sure there was at least one. Instead I got to live for six months with freight trains screeching to a halt directly below my bedroom window at 2AM and then leaving the engines idling all night. After a while I thought I had gotten used to it. A couple months after we moved out, though, my SO and I looked at each other and said “hey, you know what? we aren’t tired all the time anymore.”
My worst roommate horror story is the time I came home from work and there was a strange guy sitting bolt upright on the sofa, tweaked out of his mind on meth, eyeballs quietly vibrating. He assured me that when the police came for him he would go quietly, he didn’t want to cause me any trouble. No one else was home. Loser Roommate #2, when he came back six hours later, did admit to knowing the guy and letting him into the apartment, figuring that it was better than leaving him on the street, which I guess is not wrong, but I damn well wouldn’t have turned around and left him there alone. I made him watch the guy until the meth finally wore off the following afternoon.
I could go on and on, but I’ll just drop in to tell you all about the time my landlord wanted to beat a raccoon to death in our backyard after catching it in the attic and we had to threaten to call the cops to stop him.
He also implied we were whores because he saw us on our veranda with THREE BOYS. While he was creepily cruising by the house late at night to see if he could catch us…whoring?
I could go on and on, but I'll just drop in to tell you all about the time my landlord wanted to beat a raccoon to death in our backyard after catching it in the attic and we had to threaten to call the cops to stop him.
He also implied we were whores because he saw us on our veranda with THREE BOYS. While he was creepily cruising by the house late at night to see if he could catch us…whoring?
I am the horror story in most apartments, but all I really have for you is a shopping suggestion, which is a book that my ladyfriend Practical Aunt Aimee (who is not really my aunt but you know, some girls!) bought me and made me read and it just is so soothing even to go through its little lists?
http://www.amazon.com/Home-Comforts-Science-Keepi…
Not sure if it ever made me even a little more useful, but it definitely made me feel serene, like I might someday be useful, how nice!
Also find out where your water main is and determine whether you need a stopcock key (real thing, not nearly as wonderful as it sounds).
Oh my gosh, I love “Home Comforts.” Laurie Colwin taught me to cook/eat, and Jolie Kerr/”Home Comforts” taught me to clean and keep a home.
That would make a good opening line for a novel.
I once lived with a roommate, who after I did anything even vaguely nice would say “Thank you, Mommy” in the creepiest way possible.
Can’t say it should be standard practice, but the first thing I did when we got our house was replace all the curtains and rip up all the carpets. It made for a much better smelling bungalow.
WORST LANDLORD STORY
The house I grew up in belonged to this rich, old, rude, benevolently racist white English guy who INSISTED that my Pearents work as largely unpaid live-in housekeepers for reduced rent, out of the kindness of his heart. I would type emails for him and stuff.
Because my Pearents were scared of homelessness and didn't have a support system, they chose to stay. My Pearents nursed him throughout his long illness, taking on duties which were better suited to professional carers as he bluntly refused to hire proper help. When he died last year, they were left homeless, with only a small amount of money.
It could've been worse. It was a big house with a lovely garden but the landlord kept it in very poor condition–there was weird mould, no smoke alarm, and very poor heating. He also wouldn't pay for new fridges or washing machines or general upkeep. If he was on holiday while the boiler broke, we'd wash out of a bucket with boiled hot water. Living there was weird. The dude would walk around in just his underwear in high summer and would enter our living area without notice/permission sometimes. I could hear him watching porn in the room above mine.
And there was this one time when he was on one of his many trips to Thailand (he would fly there 3 x a year business class but complain endlessly if my Pearents visited their home country once every few years) and tried to woo a young Thai woman, who was understandably wary. He used me as an example of why he was trustworthy–I was 8 or 9 at the time–and encouraged the young woman to write letters to me and practise her English. He wanted me to correspond with her, and when my mother stuck up for me and said it was inappropriate, asked why it was apparently so hard for me to just write a friendly letter.
I remember worrying about it at school–I was in Year 5 I think–and dreading coming home that day.
It sounds almost comical but, well… there it is.
You will need a drill! But not a cordless one because you won’t use it very often and the batteries will always be dead.
Heh. Unless you’re my other half, and you have a newly-discovered passion for DIYing everything, brought on by the totally linked forces of OWNING A HOUSE and HAVING A MORTGAGE.
Then the battery will be dead from constant use.
I recently moved in with my boyfriend of 9ish months. We started dating about a week before he moved into his/our apartment. I knew from the beginning he had roaches but didn’t have any say in calling an exterminator until I moved in, which I did under three conditions. (a) Get rid of the bugs, (b) We need to have people over sometimes, (c) We need to move by the end of the year.
So he agreed to get an exterminator out. Before that happened we needed to remove everything from every shelf and cabinet in the kitchen. All was going well until he opened a cabinet he never used and found HUNDREDS of juvenile roaches inside. HUN. DREDS. He is so lucky I love him as much as I do.
They are all dead now and I hope they’re burning in roach hell.
My last apartment was a studio in an Edwardian building in SF, with all the lovely details I fell in love with: hardwood floors with a twining pattern inlaid in darker wood around the edges, built-in cabinets with frosted glass panes, crown molding and picture rails, a breakfast nook and a bay window. It had at one time had a Murphy bed that came out the side of the closet, so it had a strangely large door with a weird hinge on it and a closet big enough that I could (and did) put a queen size bed in it and still have room for a dresser. It was on a quiet tree-lined street where the Mission meets Noe Valley, just a few blocks from BART.
Those were the good things. The bad things included the old building manager never fixing anything completely, so the windows didn't have sash cords and bulged with rotted wood painted over numerous times. In fact "paint it over" seems to have been a pretty standard fix-it technique. There was some kind of small leak that created water damage very slowly and cracked the plaster, which would get patched and then the patch would peel off gradually over a two year period. The drains never drained completely, and the sewer line needed to be roto-rooted annually to clear out the tree roots growing into it. The faucets always dripped, the floors were sloped enough that it was noticeable when crossing the room, and the closet I slept in was close enough to the elevator to alert me each time someone came home late. I considered these all minor inconveniences. The drama was all with the other residents: the elderly man who died in the apartment across the hall and wasn't missed until someone complained about the smell in the hallway. The hoarder a few doors down who was eventually discovered to have blockaded all but a narrow sliver of hallway with old newspapers (and the buckets he used for his toilet after the plumbing got blocked and he couldn't bring himself to have anyone in to fix it). The upstairs neighbor, who was increasingly nasty with me as he spiraled downward into alcoholism. He regularly had midweek late night solo dance parties, cussed out anyone he ran into in the hall, and had a boyfriend whose fetish for sex in the bathtub caused enough sloshing over that it eventually caused a portion of my bathroom ceiling to cave in completely.
I miss it still.
I had about two weeks to find a place after accepting my first job out of college and ending up signing a lease with a girl who seemed normal and fiscally responsible but turned out to be a Roommate From Hell. She never cleaned (hoarded dishes in her room), never paid bills on time, got and lost jobs repeatedly, smoked weed (fine except that I have asthma & she told me she was drug-free when I signed the lease), brought dudes back for hook-ups regularly (had told me she rarely had overnight guests), and one weekend, had friends over without telling me but completely disappeared and didn’t answer their or my calls or texts – they just crashed in the apartment overnight while I hoped I wasn’t going to be murdered by complete strangers.
I kicked her out after she missed two months worth of rent, and contacted her parents, who co-signed, for the money. Dad was cooperative for a while but eventually told me he was an ex-cop and said that he’d had a former roommate arrested for drug use (implying that it was a set-up). I contacted a lawyer who told me that it’d be more trouble than it was worth to recover the money and I let the thing drop because I was so tired of it all.
I bought a house in May, and within two weeks had developed terrible hives. We were all convinced I was allergic to something, but what? My new bed topper? Something in the carpets? At one point I was taking NINE PILLS A DAY and still had hives. Finally I got in to see a specialist and it turned out to be auto-immune related and she put me on this crazy medicine that is usually used when ppl get liver transplants, but it worked. Weirdly, my cat has ALSO developed a weird rare disorder (feline hyperesthesia) since we moved into the house. Otherwise, it’s great! I love having everything just so in my space and knowing I can do what I want with it. I also am very proud of my paint color choices and other color palette related things.
My worst roommate story: my junior year I lived in a dorm room with three other girls. Yes, FOUR of us in one room, with a bathroom that we shared with the three girls in the room next door. Those girls are a story unto themselves, but nothing compared to the girl whose bed was next to mine.
My sleep is very valuable to me, and I was taking an 8 am organic chemistry class. I figured out that I could wake up at 7:30, get dressed and make it to class on time, thus giving me the most sleep possible without missing class. No one else in the room had any classes that started until 9 am, and the girl who slept next to me (let’s call her Ana) didn’t have class until 10.
I am also a light sleeper, so any alarm will wake me up. This is great for other people in the room, since it takes me about 10 seconds to shut off any alarm I set.
Ana, it turns out, is a heavy sleeper. To combat this she set her alarm to go off EVERY FIFTEEN MINUTES FOR TWO HOURS so she could wake up at 8 AM to finish work before her 10 am class. This meant that an alarm would start going off AT 6 AM and then not shut off until after I left for class. The alarm would turn itself off after a minute of ringing, and she would just not actually physically get up until 8 AM at the earliest.
After a month of this, I finally broke down and shut off her alarm after the third time it went off. When I came back to the room at 9 after class, she yelled at me for shutting it off and making her “oversleep”. Never mind that she couldn’t possibly be late for class since it wasn’t for another hour. I told her to buy a louder alarm if she couldn’t wake up to the one she had right now.
I am a huge oversleeper like that (it’s actually related to a circadian rhythm disorder in my case) and have alarms like that, though not quite that obnoxious, and have been deeply grateful that all the roommates I’ve ever had have also be heavy sleepers, so we can just ignore each other’s alarms. Except one. She found my alarms irritating, which is reasonable, but her response (rather than asking me not to set so many alarms or even waking me up and asking me to please turn off all my alarms) was to get out of bed and physically stand over me yelling at me that she hated me. I was extremely pleased when she moved into a different room second semester and I got that double all to myself. Moral of the story, I guess, is that sleep schedule differences can be a big deal and I am now wary of ever sharing close quarters with early risers ever again.
Ahaha this reminded me of when I studied abroad in Philadelphia. We don’t generally do living-away roommate dorm room type deals at university in Australia, so this was my first and only time with a) a psychologically abusive French roommate, and b) a next-door neighbour whose alarm went off one morning, and stayed going off for three days.
I had forgotten about that until just now. The alarm, unfortunately, not the roommate. She’s in there forever.
I lived in a shared house at university with someone who was awful in many ways, one of which was leaving his alarm switched off when he went for a shower in the morning. It would start going off, there would be nobody there to shut it off, and it would continue for ages.
Terrible roommate story: My senior year housemate had a tendency to collect waifs and strays, to the extent that we had (in addition to the two of us) a girl living in the garden shed and also a family of four living in our living room. Since none of them were on the lease, of course, they weren’t obligated to pay rent (and my housemate was doing them a favor so it wouldn’t be cool to ask for, like, money, you know?).
After I came back from winter break to discover someone had been sleeping in my bed, I started making plans to move elsewhere…only to be cut off at the pass by my housemate, who told me that she was kicking me out because I was being antisocial by not wanting to hang out with her friends/having a problem with unknown people sleeping in my bed/trying to ask the living room squatters for rent money.
When I was packing up my stuff to move, I discovered an empty box of condoms under my bed. I guess whoever had been sleeping there hadn’t just been sleeping there.
My sister-in-law collects stray people like that, too, and then can’t figure out why her stuff gets stolen, or why she’s been evicted from multiple apartments. Bless.
First college roommate (who I think was actually entirely nocturnal; I never saw her awake during the day) had a lot of general problems (super messy, loud late at night, her boyfriend kept coming over & never bothered to knock so I’d just come in and find a strange dude in our room, etc) but the silliest one was when she accused me & our two housemates of stealing her hot pockets and tampons. The accusations morphed into racist comments about why she was sure it was housemate #2. Our RA was ineffectual, our non-English-speaking exchange student housemate #3 spent a lot of time in tears, and when I came back after winter break, Accuser Roommate had dropped out without warning.
The girl who ended up replacing her never actually spoke to me. We slept a few feet away from each other for months, but when I ran into her the following year, she said I looked familiar but couldn’t place me. Still better than being screamed at over a missing tampon.
Two weeks ago a pregnant mouse ran into my apartment when they were exterminating and gave birth and my roommate’s cats kicked the babies out from under the couch and I stepped on one and wanted to die. Our super swept the rest of the litter (?????????) away and handed us a sticky trap for the mom. BONUS POINTS FOR YOU: I live in New York.
*reads thread*
I will never complain about my college roommates or living quarters again. O_O
No meth? No problem!
I once returned home to my college apartment (which I shared with a Film major) to find my roommate and her friends gone. The door was unlocked. There was a recently-used bong on the coffee table. The kitchen was a total mess from making brownies. And they had left the goddamn gas on.
And of course, they had already eaten all the brownies.
When I was studying abroad in Vienna I had the worst roommate. She didn’t speak German, which she was supposedly studying, or any English, which fair enough, only Turkish. Automatically we had a communications issue, so there was a lot of miming and crappy goggle translate.One thing I made abundantly clear was that she could not smoke in our room because I have horrible allergies and that was just not okay. We were only on the second floor so it was not difficult to leave by any number of doors to smoke outside. Throughout the entire semester she would smoke in the room, and every time I would bring it up she constantly deny it. The building managers did nothing about it, and I had terrible stuffiness the whole time.
Plus, she never left the room, would watch videos online until 4 in the morning (refusing to use headphones even when I offered mine), and complained when I woke her up at 7 pm getting back from classes. I swear she was a vampire, because there were days on end she never left (as far as I could tell) during daylight. Needless to say I didn’t spend too much time in that room. Oh, and the 7 story student dormitory only had one washer and dryer for EVERYONE! How is that not just some horribly cruel joke?
My boyfriend’s old apartment has the best stories:
While living there: The landlord and wife would drop in whenever they pleased. They let the downstairs tenants come up and use the bathroom when theirs was being repaired. They walked in on a (nekkid) roommate napping while showing the apartment to prospective new tenants. The only heat came out of a tiny broken hole in the bathroom (in a New England winter!). Fixed a dishwasher using YouTube.
After leaving: The landlords sent a letter to my boyfriend and his roommates explaining why they weren’t getting their security deposit. Of the more outrageous claims was one that the upstairs toilet was installed incorrectly (toilet was installed before moving in). The night we moved him out of the apartment, there was a giant storm and a huge tree branch fell in front of the apartment. The landlords inquired as to why the guys “pulled this branch down.”
But it was a good place to have a party!
That branch thing happened to me! Like, why would you assume we did that, and left it there? Were you not aware of the news headline-making storm that just ripped off people’s roofs and caused millions of dollars of damage?
Oh, no. That branch. We just… didn’t like it. We thought it looked better lying half-detached on the ground.
That reminds me of a friend who also had a branch fall on her car. Turns out it was the tree in front of her former high school teacher’s house.
Friend: Can I get your name for insurance?
Teacher: Uhh… *avoid answering the question is some bizarre attempt to limit liability*
Friend: I know who you are Mr M., I just don’t know your first name.
Why yes, he was dick then! and apparently remains so.
My upstairs neighbors have a toddler who loves to flush everything. At one point I had 11 (ELEVEN) simultaneous ceiling/wall leaks because their toilet had yet again overflown, but this time the parents hadn’t heard it and it ran for hours.
Not my real account for what will soon be obvious reasons:
If you have bed bugs, which is a terrible experience that (reportedly) makes you feel ABSOLUTELY CRAZY and terrible and sometimes very very alone–
before you do something sane and self-care-like and reach out to your social network to comfort you and give you advice–
Pause.
You may, on a future rental lease, be asked to sign something stating if you have EVER had bed bugs, and if you have, provide documentation that you are now clean from a reputable exterminator. Every potential outcome of that situation is probably easier if you don’t have a trail of posts all over the place indicating a past of bed bugs.
I mean, it may still be worth it to you to post/tweet/etc. But, just, consider this first, okay?
Senior year of college, a friend “inherited” an apartment from some graduating friends. The people we inherited it from were nice enough, but kind of… scatterbrained and a little clueless about things. Like they left all their furniture… as well as anything else they didn’t want, including bags of clothing, kitchenware, and massive, massive amounts of food. I was the first person to move in, and found the fridge full of eggs and open meat and condiments, and the freezer full of individually bagged bread heels. The eggs, it turned out, were a gift from one of their grandmother’s farm, but everything else was just gross.
And did I mention the pantry was also full of food? Like… rice, quinoa, flour? You may be able to see where I’m going with this…
About two weeks in, there were maggots. Everywhere. Full on pantry moth invasion in its larval stage. I was alone that week, both the subletter, one roommate, and my boyfriend being out of town, and maggots are one of my greatest fears due to a bad childhood experience. I alternated crying and fumigating things with Lysol for the rest of the day.
Worst part? The next morning, having recovered slightly, I went to take out the trash. I opened the lid of our flip-top garbage can… yup, there were maggots, clinging to the top, unable to escape but determined to go out in the most horrifying way possible. Hundreds of them, writhing there. Round two of crying and Lysol. Apparently my tweets from that week were hilarious to my future roommates, but I was not amused.
I just want to give you a big hug and rock and cry with you. My first solo apartment had been abandoned by the previous tenant and the “cleaning” the landlord did beforehand didn’t leave behind live maggots, but dead ones, clinging to the creases in the refrigerator door, the inside of the crisper drawers, dried onto the ice cube trays. I had to go buy a new refrigerator.
I can’t deal with that type of thing now. I had one single bag of flour in the last ten years that wound up buggy and I cried and walked away from it and let MrKat handle it, because if there is at least one way in which my marriage is a pathetic hetero cliche (there are SO MANY WAYS), it is that he handles live bug situations.
I once found maggots in my trash can, duct taped the lid closed, and took the entire thing to the building garbage. It didn’t even occur to me that there was any other possible course of action.
OH MY GOD.
We’ve struggled with pantry moths for 3.5 years at my house. I keep getting thisclose to getting rid of them… and then they rear their little horrid heads again.
I once found the ground zero of an infestation, which was a big glass container full of barley flour that was like 3/4 maggots. I freaked out and put in the backyard, because somehow I couldn’t bring myself to throw the container away. It’s glaassssss. I dunno, I’m crazy. My boyfriend did it. Bless him.
In my last apartment, we apparently had maggots living in one of our recycle cans. Which I found out because I came home to find the kitchen FILLED with flies. Hundreds of flies. Thankfully my dad was visiting and so he helped me conquer the problem. I don’t know what would have happened if he wasn’t there, as my roommate just watched us fix the problem, slack-jawed.
Maggot Incident story- When I lived in DC I lived with 7 other girls for the summer. There were numerous things that weren’t great but overall I had a wonderful time. But anyway- because I was the Tallest I did the “Dad” stuff- took care of bugs, opened pickle jars, drank tequila straight, watched sports etc. I also took out the trash a lot, but not all the time because I didn’t live with animals I lived with Grown Women who were more than capable of taking out the trash and did so. But I went away one weekend and they had a party (which was fine) and they had hamburgers and bought too much meat and threw the leftovers out. Well, not out, into a bag. Which they left in the backyard. For a month. The month of July in specific. After the fly invasion (which was oh so confusing to them for some reason?) I had had enough and brought the bag in through the house (townhouse) and out to the dumpster. Walking back I discovered that I had left a trail of maggots and… slimy stuff behind me. I cleaned up as best I could but when one of the other housemates freaked out because she found a maggot I had missed on her backpack I told her that she’d better suck it up because she deserved it for not taking the meat bag out when I asked her to. And this is why I loved that house and those ladies- she agreed and never mentioned it again except as a self-deprecating story.
MEAT BAG
I also have an intense fear of maggots as a result of summer month period trash from a house full of women. UGH.
Home ownership story courtesy of my parents: When my mom and step-dad got married they decided to start fresh in a new house. They used an old friend as a realtor and he found them a great place in a good neighborhood. There was just this teeny tiny question about the basement (basements not being a common feature in houses in that state) but the realtor swore up and down that everything was fine, no problems, sign on the line. And because he was an old friend, they trusted him.
I don’t remember if it was before, during, or immediately after the closing, but the basement filled with water. I’m unclear on the details of the Sump Pump Saga, but the short version is they somehow got in touch with the previous owners (in a weird way, like at a dinner party or something) and said, “What the hell is up with this basement full of water! Nobody told us about this!” And the previous owners said, “What are you talking about? We had to disclose all the water damage when we listed the house.”
Needless to say they’re not friends with that realtor anymore.
The good news is everything worked out. The basement is now a lovely den, the sump pump works perfectly, and you can’t smell the water-rotted raccoon corpse at all anymore. Just don’t ask them how much it cost.
My sister lived in a house with a water filled basement, too! At one point it flooded and the landlord just refused to do anything. My sister complained about the damp walls all the way up to her room on the third floor and the landlord told her that all the condensation was caused by her “breathing too wetly”.
I had an awful garbage creature of a landlord. When I got there, the landlord was doing…something to the door and the place hadn’t been cleaned yet, even though it was suppose to have been cleaned the night before. Fine, things happen. I came back, and the front door didn’t close. Not even didn’t lock, just didn’t stay shut. I shoved a bag of cat litter in front of it and called the landlord, who acted very inconvenienced by the fact that I was asking him to fix the door he’d broken. He showed up at 11PM. This was a great time to ask him why there was no fridge in the kitchen. Oh, apparently you should measure doorways before buying fridges because sometimes they don’t fit? My roommate and I lived without a fridge the first week and were so happy when it finally arrived! And then so sad when the landlord said, “cool, now that the fridge is here I’m going to rip up your kitchen to replace the cabinets!” Two more weeks without a kitchen. The apartment was the first floor of a big old Victorian he’d bought. He and his buddies would do the second floor renovation until at least midnight every night, until I complained to the city.
Other fun hits include:
-Turning off the furnace when we were at work and then claiming it was broken when we got home and called him. He’d ‘get it fixed’ the next morning.
-Removing the first two steps from the basement stairs so we couldn’t turn the furnace back on ourselves once we caught on to what he was doing.
-He texted me to say he needed to get into the apartment for a minute. I came home that evening to find that he’d removed the exterior of one of the walls in my room without laying so much as a drop cloth down, covering everything I own with plaster and dust and ruining some of my stuff with what appeared to be just gobs of spackle.
-Shoving a handful of $20s at me when I started screaming about suing his ass for the above incident and telling me to buy myself a ‘new dress or something.’
-Hanging out in our driveway with his friends all night, drinking beer and loudly speculating on the sexual orientation of my roommate and me, because the only explanation for us not being into them was that we were not into any men.
God, I hate that man.
This one is a pretty close call for worst landlord, I think. You poor thing!
Oooh oooh! Did someone say “horror roommate stories”?
My college roommate freshman year (randomly assigned, natch) was a manipulative asshole who once walked in while I was mid-mental breakdown, laying face-down on my bed and expressed aloud to her friend that she didn’t think I was breathing and then laughed. Soooo many other stories, but that is the worst/most representative about my terrifying first semester (second semester I got me a boyfriend with his own room).
As for things you should buy for a new house, I recommend:
–A drill
–A wide variety of picture-hanging doohickeys
–Pet furniture that would never have fit in your apartment
–Ladder
–Any yard/sidewalk-care stuff you may need (rake, shovel, lawnmower, etc.)
–Fire extinguisher
–Smoke alarms/a carbon monoxide tester
–A bunch of extension cords/surge protectors
–Papasan chair (which, as I knew them up until last year as “those funky chairs that all my friends’ moms seem to have”)
I once came home from a red eye flight to find someone sleeping in my bed. Apparently my roommate let a friend crash in my room for a week without ever asking me (and I probably would have said yes!). Then the next day I get in my car (which I let him borrow in exchange for driving me to the airport) to find a couple of books of mine, signed first editions by favorite authors, scattered in a pile in the backseat. Apparently he also let this friend borrow whatever she wanted out my room during her visit.
He wasn’t even the worst roommate I had while living in this apartment. I lived there 3 years and had 9 roommates during that time.
The bed is bad enough… but I would have punched someone for the books.
*internally shrieking over the books*
Before MrChouffe and I met, I lived in a small, but cozy one-bedroom-plus-attic located directly above an accounting office. The accountant owned the place, and I worked days, so perfect, right? Free wifi, free utilities, not too expensive, a block from work and a ten-minute walk to downtown.
The first night there I killed a centipede and bought my first ever mousetraps.
More or less, the place was OK, except for the night that the accountant relapsed and got superlatively drunk and came back to the office at 2AM. I was in the middle of tech week and desperately, uncontrollably exhausted, and I was just starting to fall asleep when my phone began buzzing. He was texting me from downstairs, over and over again, just saying “Knock three times.” And then he banged on the pipes to let me know he knew I was listening.
I moved out not too terribly long after, to another upstairs apartment in the same neighborhood. Still had attic storage, had a nice patio and on-site free laundry shared with the downstairs apartment, and reasonable downstairs neighbors, until the downstairs neighbors moved out and were replaced with a lady and her kids and a lot of boyfriends who all smoked and sold a variety of drugs. One of the boyfriends eventually moved in with his kids. My clothes constantly, constantly reeked of pot, and the downstairs people did laundry from 6AM to 10PM every day. I eventually had to get the landlord involved because a) I worked at a health insurance company and couldn’t really justify showing up smelling like weed, and b) I could never ever ever do laundry.
Once MrChouffe moved in, we immediately started looking for a larger place, because aforementioned Pot Apartment was just not at all big enough for two people. I ended up breaking my lease a couple of months early, and offered to find my landlady a new tenant to compensate. I found someone who signed a new lease with the landlord and then vanished, so four days before I was scheduled to move I was scrambling around trying to find another tenant because the landlord was going to charge me rent if I didn’t. Never mind that the new signed lease should have overwritten mine, no one was subletting anything… anyway.
The next apartment was the best I have ever lived in and I miss it forever.
Now we have a lovely mid-century ranch that we own, and it’s great, and never ever renovate your own kitchen or live next door to a psychotic ex-lawyer with mold poisoning. Trust me.
I know I’m two weeks late to this…but I think he was creepily hitting on you via acting out this old song, lyrics are “knock three times on the ceiling if you want me, twice on the pipes, if the answer is no.” Still terrible but makes his weird texts have a little bit of context? Apologies if you had already thought of this!
I have many but will content myself with one. My best friend I lived in the ground floor corner apartment of a complex during college. The people above us had loud annoying parties pretty often, but one night they were particularly intolerable and obnoxious, and since we knew where the circuit breakers for the whole building were, we went and switched off the power to their unit. There was a great shout of dismay from above, followed by an interval of blissful silence… and then someone upstairs went out on the balcony with an acoustic guitar and led their ten million party guests in a sing-along of Jimmy Buffet songs.
We turned their power back on immediately.
Hahaaha! I’ve had several housing situations where I had to pull the breaker. Fortunately, my loud neighbours didn’t think to do sing a long in response.
My first apartment had a horrendous roach problem. I complained to the super and the management company multiple times but they did nothing. But on the upside I am now totally unafraid of killing roaches.
I had a few weird roommates in college. One had no sense of hygiene and on occasion left her period-stained underwear in the shower and didn’t understand that she wasn’t supposed to do that. Another went an entire semester without doing laundry and when she moved out we found months-old dirty dishes encrusting away on the windowsill.
Current moving drama:
My current landlord who is also my roommate (she owns the house and the other two of us rent from her) informed me that both she and my other roommate are planning to move out within a month or so, so unless I could find two other roommates to replace them, she was giving me 60 days’ notice. I did not want to stay and agreed I’d move out after 60 days. (This was mid-month btw).
Fast forward a month and a half and I have a place to move by the 15th, already put down a deposit, and text my landlord (we’re pretty casual about most things) just to check that since I’ll be moving out on the 15th (the end of the 60 days) the check for this month should be prorated to a half-month. She responds all confused and surprised and tells me I owe her 30 days’ notice before moving out (???) so no, I can’t prorate the rent, I need to pay her a full month’s rent even though I won’t be living here.
I reluctantly agree because I paid a half-month’s security deposit back in the beginning and have every intention of getting it back, but what the hell? We already had the 60 day notice. She told me that I would be moving mid-month.
UGGGGGHHHHH.
So I’m waiting out the month. Luckily my future roommate in the other place was understanding and I’ll be able to move in there on the 31st, but ugh. I’m going to be spending the next 2 weeks living out of already-packed-up boxes.
And three days ago she told me she’s not actually moving out after all so now *she* is the one who needs to find 2 new roommates, and had the gall to be *pissed* about it.
I LOVE MY HOUSE! I know nothing about home ownership, still, and I have to call my Dad for almost everything, but I’ve had it for several years now and it hasn’t fallen down around my ears, so you will also be fine.
Oh wait I have another one: when I moved in with my (randomly assigned) freshman college dorm roommate I was excited to see he had a HUGE collection of CDs and cassettes… until I looked closely and saw they were all — every single one — Dave Matthews Band bootlegs. My next random roommate used to call our room’s answering machine and leave a message saying “Moo?” pretty much every day. I moved out halfway through that year.
You toss that last one in real casual-like. . .WHAT? Did you ever ask him why he would call and say Moo to himself every day? That is SO WEIRD.
He tended to just stare at you intently and blankly if you asked him *anything*. He also wrote “Moo” backwards on our window screen in orange chalk, so you could read it from outside. I guess he really liked cows. When he first moved in I invited him out with some friends (he was new to the school and didn’t know anyone) as a gesture of kindness, and he followed us around all night… about twenty feet behind us.
THAT IS TERRIFYING.
My first year of grad school, I lived in a fourth-floor apartment that had a sunroom in front. Since neither my roommate nor I had enough furniture to actually do anything with the space other than stand in it and be amazed that we had a sunroom, it went mostly unused.
One day, after we’d been there about a month, I happened to walk by the doors to said sunroom and noticed what seemed to be a bunch of dirt scattered across the floor, like the cat had knocked over a fern or something. “Strange,” I thought, since in addition to a lack of furniture we also lacked potted plants and cats, and bent down to investigate.
The spots weren’t dirt at all. They were dead bees.
So many dead bees that when I went to get the dustpan, I had to fill it up twice.
Over the next few weeks, we found bee corpses there every single day. Not quite so many as that first time, but usually there were at least a dozen scattered across the floor. Always stone-cold dead.
Not once did either of us see or even hear a live bee flying around the apartment. Not once did either of us see a live bee coming into the apartment, despite checking the windows and doors constantly for holes in the screens or a crack left ajar. Nor could we find any sign of hives on our building or the neighboring buildings.
The bees stopped appearing in late fall, when it got cold. My roommate and I agreed that it was probably in our best interest to enter the sunroom as little as possible, and moved the following spring.
That happened to me, except replace sunroom with bedroom and bees with wasps. We eventually discovered that there was a nest of the horrible things in between the outside wall of the house and our bedroom wall. When we told the landlord, he said he would come over and fill in the entrance to the nest on the outside wall, and I had to point out that if he did that, the angry and confused wasps would have nowhere to go but inside our damn bedroom.
I bought a house in the Temescal in which, since finding out involved cutting a hole in a wall we found out after purchasing but thankfully before using the hot water heater, the hot water heater vented all its carbon monoxide DIRECTLY INTO THE WALL/HOUSE rather than outside as is customary and, you know, safe. Fortunately we had allowed ourselves a few weeks of overlap on our apartment in order to paint, etc., so we did not have to go without hot showers for the two weeks it took to get somebody to punch a vent hole in the outside wall.
On the “yay” side of things, though, I finally got to paint and glitter an entire staircase. Bright red. Being a grownup is awesome sometimes.
Plz send pics of red glitter stairs.
Fantastic. THIS is why home ownership is worth it!
Terrible apartment story: husband and I used to live in this apartment on a very busy intersection in Baltimore. You want to know how busy?
It was so busy that our apartment building/victorian rowhouse was hit on average of once every three months by a car. The rowhouse is set back at least ten feet from the curb. It’s remarkable and sad how often we would wake up, leave the house for work, and just find car debris or skid marks all over the front yard.
In other news, husband and I are now discussing whether or not we should seriously buy a house because of:
1) historically low interest rates!
2) we actually have some money saved up!
3) maybe we’ll have kids in a few years (!?)
4) we don’t seem to be leaving this city anytime soon and the alternatives are not terribly appealing/affordable!
so there is that.
My mom lives on a relatively quiet, narrow, almost-dead-end street (like, you don’t know that it connects with a small service road unless you live on the street) in Charlotte NC, and our mailbox keeps getting run over. When we first moved in, it was an entirely brick mailbox … like the thing was SOLID brick and at least 3 feet on each side, with reflectors so people can see it in the dark … and someone still managed to run into it and destroy (1) his car, (2) the mailbox and all the brick, and (3) the siding of the house next door. The dude is lucky he didn’t die, but he was in the hospital for a week or so.
We replaced it with a regular, non-brick mailbox with steel poles on each side to theoretically reinforce it, but it doesn’t really seem to help because it just happened again last week, plus the driver ran into the brick embankment after she hit the mailbox and destroyed her car THAT way. My mom is seriously considering petitioning the city to add speed bumps, because there’s no way any of these insane drivers were actually going the speed limit, which is 35, and also where on EARTH were they going in such a hurry???
Install a keypad lock on one of your exterior doors! I am always leaving my keys behind and used to have to climb through my neighbor’s window and onto our dangerous fire escape to get back into my apartment. Bought a house last year and installed a keypad lock on the basement walk-out door. Never locked out again!!
Also, here is my recommended list of tools to have:
Screwdrivers in a couple different sizes (or one with heads you can switch out) – both Phillips (the x one) and flat heads
A drill. Not a super-expensive one, necessarily, but they come in so handy (especially when assembling and disassembling Ikea furniture)
A small hammer for hanging pictures and the like, and a big one for big stuff
A set of Allen wrenches
A level
A stud finder (har har) (you can get just a cheap little magnet one that finds nails inside the walls where the studs are)
A small saw or other cutting tool
Heavy-duty scissors/shears
A tape measure
Plus as others have mentioned, WD-40 and lots and lots of Command hooks/strips/etc.
Yes definitely all of these. And probably a ladder as mentioned elsewhere.
Horror story time hooray! When I was in college in Baltimore I rented a row house with a bunch of friends in our junior and senior years. It was great fun, although the house was a disaster. There were two front doors. One normal door that opened onto a normal porch and was attached to normal steps, and a second door that opened led to a spot three feet off the ground outside. There was no landing and no stairs, but a there was a rusty pipe thing that looked like it may have been a railing. During finals weeks (TWICE! DURING TWO DIFFERENT SETS OF FINALS! IN DIFFERENT YEARS!) a “root ball” clogged the sewer outside, causing raw sewage to flood the basement from the toilet in the basement bathroom, and then somehow backed up even more and caused raw sewage to leak out of the upstairs bathroom and through the ceiling onto the dining room table where we kept all of our books. My housemate had to study by putting her hands in plastic bags to turn the pages of her pooped up textbooks. After the landlady got the basement basement fixed up, a creepy pale green albino plant grew up through the new carpeting. It sprouted up about as far away from the outside as possible. I don’t remember how we killed it. I’m thinking maybe hexes and fire.
I just bought a condo last year and nothing went wrong and the whole process was surprisingly easy (people always seem…weirdly disappointed? to hear that, like they were looking forward to some juicy tales of real estate agony and I’ve really let them down). Anyway, I hope that is the case for you too!
-Key tools to have would be an electric drill, pliers, and an adjustable wrench. Also a ladder (unless you enjoy worrying that you might die while balancing on a box on an office chair while trying to change a lightbulb).
-One thing I super enjoyed doing after committing all my money to buying a small condo in an overpriced city was perusing privateislandsonline.com for islands I could have bought for less (I could own a 20 acre private island in British Columbia with a cabin and a smokehouse!).
My horror story is: I’m a sex worker, I work from home and I live with 3 other persons. It can be… interesting.
Are your other roommates sex workers too?? I’m fascinated by the thought of a sex worker with roommates!
I lived in a townhouse next door to a legit pimp named Benny. At first we thought it was hilarious, because it seemed mostly like an affect. I mean, he matched his shiny suits and hats to his canes to his cars, and all the little kids in the complex called him Mr. Benny and he just seemed like this local eccentric/elder statesman type.
But, then things started getting kind of strange. He was probably in his 60s, but there were people in their 20s and 30s coming and going from his apartment. The guys were often doing odd jobs; sometimes he would send them to do landscaping at our place (he was fastidious and we were… not). The women never did odd jobs, but by the third time an ambulance came in the middle of the night to take a young lady away (Benny never followed), we weren’t laughing at the whole thing anymore. Except for when he’d ride his bicycle around the complex in a pink velour track suit with gold chains and a fuzzy hat (circa 2007). That was always funny.
When I was an undergrad, my friend closed the door to the bathroom in our apartment and the hanging ceiling collapsed on him. They also wouldn’t give us keys to the basement, which was infested with rats so large my landlady accused me of not knowing the difference between a rat and a possum.
When I was a grad student, I came home after spring break to find grass growing up through the floorboards of my bedroom, to roughly three feet up the wall. (this is a different apartment than the one above)
The grass story is EERIE. There’s nothing quite so terrifying as nature encroaching on your inside spaces. Like the apocalypse has already happened.
It was bizarre. The bedroom had been a sleeping porch, and (I later found out) the sewage lines had a slow leak, so it makes total sense, but it was truly a strange experience to come home to tall grass in my house. Especially because I lived in the desert, so grass was a rarity.
We JUST signed the lease for a flat (buying a place is so far in the future that I have now placed Mallory firmly in grownup category), so I have my fingers crossed that none of these things will happen to me!
My husband and I just bought our first condo and there’s this terrible banging/hammering sound in the walls all hours of the day and night and I’m afraid we’ve made a huge mistake.
Probably a loose pipe? If so, you just need to find the pipe and figure out how to tie it down (or ask a plumber).
We bought our first house a few years ago and oh god the first few years are so expensive.
You’re paying your mortgage, happily, and then suddenly your bathtub is leaking. Or your electrics short out. Suddenly you realise why your mum told you ‘as soon as you can afford it, get a savings account for house expenses’.
I love our little maisonette (bigger than a flat, smaller than a house). It’s ‘three bedrooms’, which in Estate Agent language, means ‘two bedrooms and a large cupboard’. We live on the second and third floors, with a balcony and a private entrance so the cats can get in and out. It’s lovely. Just… no matter how carefl you are, first time owners are often skint for the first few years.
Two bedrooms and a large cupboard, so true.
My large cupboard is now my sewing room, aka the room where I put all the crafty things I’ll definitely finish one day. It’s working well.
I rented a room in a row house in DC. It was a pretty spacious room, with a living space and then a bedroom. There was a wall with a door and a window between the living space and the bedroom, so pretty sure the bedroom was originally some sort of sun room or porch or something.
Despite living upstairs in an attic apartment, the landlady did not believe in turning on the heat for the whole house, because people were home at different times. Each room had a window AC unit and a radiator-like space heater. Unfortunately, this was not really adequate to heat the entire square footage that I had. I would wear two pairs of socks and before bed I would leave my laptop on top of the bed in order to warm it up before getting into it. Through those two pairs of socks, I got a splinter in my foot from the hardwood floors. And then I got kicked out for not being clean enough, even though at no point had anyone ever actually addressed any concerns with me (there were some passive-aggressive emails that didn’t point the finger at anyone, but until I asked I wasn’t sure they were about me).
I met with a woman and rented a room in her house. When I moved in a month later, she turned out to be a smoker. She had been in a non-smoking phase when I met her and signed the lease, and then had started again by the time I moved in, and the smell permeated my house.
I lived in another group house that I had moved into out of desperation because I needed somewhere to live. My roommates always wanted to have parties and thought I was no fun for not wanting to hang out in the living room with their guests. I was a tour guide and the last thing I wanted on my time off was having to entertain strangers. I also lived in the basement in this house, which was fantastic, except that I had to be at work at 8:00 AM and my housemates thought that 10 PM on a weeknight was a good time to play Rock Band (complete with drum kit) on the hardwood floors above my head.
Death to Party Roommates
My roommate in DC had the sun porch/living room combo! At the time I resented that her bedroom was so much bigger but we paid the same rent, but in retrospect (and now that I’m less broke) I’m pretty sure I should have felt bad for her. I don’t know how she survived the winter.
I rent a beee-yooo-tiful row house, but the house next to me was purchased by The Worst Person. She moved out the elderly tenant and began renovations. I protested when things like “my internal wall is collapsing” and “re-bar keeps coming through my kitchen wall” started happening, so she hung signs on the outside of her house with big arrows saying I was a Satanist and that the blood of Jesus was upon me.
A sign saying “Mm, Jesus Blood” should be your lawn ornament. 🙂
She sounds awful and I hope you’re talking to your city council about her.
Hopefully her renovations will be less extensive/horrifying than these people’s neighbours’.
This was the first thing I thought of too! How awful.
Earlier was the renting horror story. I have only two homeowner horror story and they’re not that horrible, just kinda gross. 1. The guy who decided to flip the house next door to ours disrupted a big yellow jacket nest when he was removing a tree stump and a lot of them decided to take refuge in our basement via a hole in the front wall. Thankfully we had a huge colony of spiders living in that part of our basement at the time and all of the yellow jackets that made it into our house were promptly devoured. 2. While we were doing our big DIY basement renovation (sorry spiders, you did us a solid favor and we evicted you) we made big piles of demolition trash. My husband was putting it all into trash bags, and he was marveling at how this piece of old 2×4 he’d just picked up was really unusually shaped when he realized that it was not actually a 2×4. It was a dried up rat corpse that was so desiccated it was rigid. We found two of them!
DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD:
I lived in a basement apartment that had two short locked doors against one wall. My roommate and I didn’t have the key and always wondered what was in them, especially after watching true crime tv. Over the summer huge numbers of ants started coming into the apartment through those doors. The landlord eventually opened them up to take care of it – they were full of boxes and water damage and ants.
Portal to the Ant Dimension.
I once came home from work to find all my roommates standing on the stairs, holding shovels and hammers and kitchen knives, because there was a raccoon in the bathroom.
In that same house, cockroaches fell from the ceiling onto my face while I was sleeping. I still have nightmares about that!
AHHHHHHHH
My first apartment was overpriced and in need of some repairs (welcome to Washington, DC), but by far the worst part of living there was the roaches. We were never sure how they got in (we were on the 8th floor) but my roommate and I eventually established their point of entry as the kitchen. We kept a bottle of windex on our dining table and whenever we had to do anything in the kitchen, we’d walk in with it and spray any like we were about to take out a hoarde of zombies. If we had company over, we’d do it quietly.
WORST NIGHTMARE.
The first stuff my husband and I bought when we moved into our house last year:
1. More copies of bathroom necessities — we moved from a series of 1-bathroom apartments into a 2.5-bathroom house. Extra plunger, extra toilet brush, extra hand towels and soap dispensers, extra bathroom mats/rugs. Realistically, this could have waited and we could have just chosen one bathroom to use for a few weeks, but having them all set up and ready to use made us feel more like we were at home.
2. A lawnmower and edger for our postage-stamp-sized yard, hedge clippers, and a hose.
3. A mailbox! The house did not have one!
4. A ladder. Then my husband asked for a better ladder for his birthday. Now we have too many ladders.
5. Some tools we had never really had occasion to own before — a small saw, a stud finder, a tape measure, a level. We already owned various screwdrivers, hammers, and a cordless drill.
6. A whole shitload of those little felt circles you put on the bottom of your furniture, because we were getting uncarpeted floors for the first time.
Oh, I forgot about little felt circles. Yes, those are good.
Also you’ve reminded me that I have to re-felt-circle some of my furniture, because some of the circles have fallen off. It’s possible that I should be buying better quality felt circles.
They make circles that are cupped shaped rather than flat- I am a terrible chair tipper/ scoocher/ etc. and the flat ones kept falling off in a day or two, but we’re at 2+ years with the cup shaped ones and going strong.
I have two, but one just happened this weekend so this is TIMELY.
The first was simply that I got bedbugs and had a negligent landlord and complicated neighbors and lost a lot of money and possessions as a result.
The recent one is: I was away this weekend visiting from friends when I got a call from my husband that our basement apartment was flooding! He had to move into a hotel for 3 days and put our dog in a kennel while they ripped out all the rugs and had crazy big dehumidifiers trying to stop mold growth. Meanwhile I’m supposed to be off having fun, but am now feeling very guilty about every penny I’m spending because hey we probably have to move. The renters insurance will not cover the damage or expenses! The landlord might end up reimbursing us for the hotel, but are just putting down fresh rugs and pretending the problem doesn’t exist, so basically it’s going to flood again the next time we get a lot of ice/snow buildup followed by rain/melting. Joy.
May your house be delightful and even if things break at least you can make your own choices about fixing/not fixing them.
So, in university, I spent one summer living in an attic room that I sublet from a dude I knew who was subletting from a different dude I knew who had rented an entire house and sublet all but one of the bedrooms. Also the main space in the basement which wasn’t actually a bedroom, and which he had separated from the stairs with a cubicle partition that I’m pretty sure he stole from somewhere, and that I moved into that September because it was cheap and available and I was too lazy to look for somewhere actually good.
Back to the summer in the attic. This house had two kitchens, from a time when it had been divided into two apartments. The second floor kitchen opened onto a balcony. The first floor kitchen had been added onto the house under the balcony, and didn’t really have insulation or heat. The entire place didn’t have air conditioning, which was seriously unpleasant in the summer in Toronto (especially in the attic). So the dude who was renting the whole house would leave the balcony door open off the kitchen, and since the screen door had big holes in it, raccoons would come in. There were two times I know of. Once, he saw them and chased them with one of his swords (he had swords, a chain mail armor project in progress, and throwing stars; he claimed to believe that taking his throwing stars to a gun fight would be a totally reasonable thing to do, if the situation ever came up). The other time, he apparently came home and frightened the raccoon that was in the kitchen, without having seen it himself, and so it bolted up to the attic.
Which is why I woke up with a terrified raccoon in my bedroom, trying to get out my window, which wasn’t open quite wide enough because I was marginally less stupid about what size openings a raccoon can get through.
I basically just sat in bed horrified on the other side of the room, because I didn’t want to scare it into attacking or anything and also I couldn’t get to the stairs without getting past it. (The door was a regular door but it was in the floor, over the stairwell opening, and it had a gap at the end, which is how the raccoon would have got in.) Eventually it managed a panicked squeeze through the window, and then in the morning I got to clean raccoon poop out of the dish drying rack.
The next place I lived was substantially less horrifying. We did let a conservative dude we knew rent one of the rooms briefly, and he was not a great roommate. He came home super drunk in the wee hours of the morning once and pissed all over the bathroom, including the toilet paper roll and the floor. And when I had a minor kitchen fire, and thought no one else was home, he turned out to have been home but he stayed in his room quietly because he heard me swearing and thought that if he came out he might have to help me. No, really, that was his explanation. He’s lucky that I got the fire put out, because since I thought no one else was home, I wouldn’t have tried to tell him if I was evacuating, and he could easily have been trapped in a burning building.
When I first moved into the city the place I wound up at seemed all right, except for the backyard full of dead refrigerators and washing machines. Being from the South i didn’t really question it until it transpired that whenever the landlord got a complaint about one of the appliances breaking down he’d just rotate the one in the house with the one in the backyard and call it good.
That wasn’t why I moved out, though. The dude who left raw, rotting meat lying around everywhere, until our yard got infested with raccoons, and then the mother and three kids who moved in and started running out to go “pet the kitties” when they’d start fighting over the meat, were why I moved out.
Mallory when I was a junior in college I paid $850/month to live in a windowless room in a 3-bedroom-and-1-spacious-closet apartment with three other people, all of whom smoked, and who liked to smoke weed in common areas, and two of them had pets, and there were, periodically, BOYFRIENDS LIVING WITH US
and ONCE one roommate’s cat took a GIANT SHIT in the bathtub because she’d been locked out of the bedroom with the litterbox all night because SEX REASONS probably
and the spoiled rich girl who always HAD to have the heat at like 78 would smoke in her room with the window open and prance around in tiny shorts in the middle of winter in FUCKING BROOKLYN and then complain when I was like it is fuckin 85 degrees in my room please stop trying to cook me to death I am doing my best here but goddamn close your window and put some fricken socks on
and there were passive-aggressive notes left all over the apartment all the time which was SILLY because they were definitely actually issues between the buddybuddy roommates but they just liked to act like it was me
but I still tried so hard to be patient and understanding and keep my shitty feelings to myself, you know, and I took care of the mean girl’s ferret for a couple days when she left on a break before I did and the little shit tried to BITE ME and she left me a letter with instructions and being like “thank you so much, here’s a little something for your trouble, I’m sorry it can’t be more, but you know, POOR COLLEGE STUDENTS” and $10 which is like
in any other context this would be FINE, I said I’d take care of the ferret expecting no compensation but there are a few additional things going on here: the pet sitter was charging like $40/day. I saved her like $120, and I did that out of generosity and a perverse desire to keep as much moral high ground as possible as a strong foundation for righteous indignation. And it is frankly WEIRD to play the student poverty card when you’re known to spend quite a lot of money on recreational substances AND you are quite vocal about getting plenty of money from daddy AND you have two parents with graduate degrees and fancy jobs to match so they can AFFORD to give you whatever you need or want.
It was just so insulting, ughhhh.
Anyway, you can’t let a room as a “bedroom” in NYC if it does not have a certain amount of ventilation and natural light and when the spring semester was over, I emailed the letting agency citing the relevant building codes and suggesting that my lease could either be dissolved early without penalty, or I could have a conversation with the fire marshall and GOODNESS but that would be a bit of unpleasantness for them on account of I know for absolute certain that I’m not the only person renting an overpriced 8×10′ closet with a bed in this set of buildings.
To which my contact at the letting agency responded with a HURT-SOUNDING TEXT MESSAGE
I was like I said what I wanted to say via email, it is FRANKLY SUSPICIOUS that you would respond to an email with a text message, also I am taking screenshots and emailing them to myself and my guarantor so do not even TRY.
I have a lot of this kind of story but it’s a little nauseating to think about so
hey! things are better now!
They’re very good at the hurt-sounding messages, aren’t they?
I had to create a separate folder in my emails labelled ‘Real estate agent horror’ so that I wouldn’t be traumatised every time one of their half-accusatory, half-hurt messages turned up in an innocent search.
man, fuck landlords. I had one break down in tears like I was betraying her when I asked for an itemized list of deductions to my deposit. I literally had to tell this grown woman to stop it and just give me my receipt. And boy wasn’t it amazing how quickly those tears stopped and the yelling started. She is a real piece of work.
Lately I’ve been subletting, which even without the money is INFINITELY PREFERABLE to other forms of house share for poor fucks what can’t afford a house on the basis of being able to kick wierdos the hell out without having to explain yourself to anyone. How bad wierdos get: the guy with the string of assault convictions he conveniently never told me about, who was buying/stealing guns in violation of a restraining order he also didn’t tell me about, and who made me get up at fuckety o’clock in the morning to pry some strangers off him when they broke into the house looking for murder, has been only maybe the third worst tenant this year. At least he only got the cops in the house twice.
OK, I’m not reading this whole thread so this stuff may have already been mentioned BUT:
1) old towels for cleaning up spills/laying on the floor when you are taking the walls apart. These are referred to in my residence as “dog towels” even though we are currently dogless due to our cat situation. You can never have too many dog towels.
2) Basic hammer, screwdriver, etc. and get a decent electric screwdriver because you’ll use it when hanging stuff in the walls.
3) Drywall screws (the metal kind, not the plastic kind) if you want to hang anything heavy on your walls.
4) Other advice I have heard: Go to a local hardware store, not Home Depot, and find the oldest guy that works there. He will be able to answer any questions you have.
5) Paint really changes a room (I mean, duh, but it’s a really inexpensive way to really transform a room). Friends will help you paint if you buy them beer and pizza.
6) You will want to clean the shit out of your new place (hopefully not literally). Bring LOTS of cleaning supplies. Instead of paper towels use rags that you can wash again, or you will end up using 1000000 paper towels.
7) If you don’t have a utility sink, try to get one installed, they are the best.
8) See if there is a home services company that does inspections of your house/has a service plan, at least for the first year. You will almost definitely use it.
9) MOST IMPORTANTLY REMEMBER YOUR HOUSE DOES NOT NEED TO LOOK LIKE PINTEREST. Nobody else’s house does, and if yours does, it will just make other people hate you.
For 3), if the house is old, check first whether the walls are drywall or plaster. I think you need a different kind of screws for plaster, though I’m not sure because my usual method of attaching heavy things to the wall involves finding a stud.
Oh, an electronic stud finder is useful. They all say they can’t be used with plaster walls, but I have one that has two drywall thickness settings, and if I use the thick drywall setting and go super slow then it works fine. But I don’t think there’s any need to buy one until you need it for some project.
Seconding the old towels thing. Who knew?
My friend discovered that a large (like 3 feet long) snake had been living in her walls when it came out and just crawled around the upstairs like it owned the place.
It probably did.
Toasties, on the housing thing-do any of y’all live in Philadelphia? I want to move there in the next year and need to figure out cost of living stuff. Can you tell me how much you spend on groceries, Septa passes, etc?
I live in Philadelphia and… can’t answer this question, because I am not a good budgeter. And I drive a car, so I do not pay attention to SEPTA passes. But welcome to my city!
Bless you, I can at least talk to you about it. <3 I currently live in NC, but I am just hopelessly in love with Philadelphia and have been since my first visit. I have a lot of really wonderful friends in PA and I just feel like I’m meant to live there. I need to find a job (I’ll be done with my degree in May) and a place to live. But I think I could be so happy there.
It’s a good city.
My biggest advice to you is, think about neighborhoods. Philadelphia has a zillion little neighborhoods with different personalities and different prices. Center City is fancy and exciting and full of young people and … a LOT more expensive than the rest of the city. Find a different neighborhood you like, ideally a short walk from a Regional Rail stop so you can get downtown easily. Take a walk around the neighborhood before committing; some neighborhoods have brutal poverty and really messed-up racially-motivated policing.
West Philly near trolley lines can be great. Roxborough’s up-and-coming, I think. Manayunk is cute but next to a canal, so Manayunk’s Main Street tends to be underwater a few times a year. Mount Airy’s got a nice balance of affordability and access to restaurants; Chestnut Hill might also. I hear that Fishtown’s starting to gentrify, but I don’t think I ever go there. Then there are the suburbs, but they’re harder to move around if you’re relying on public transport. If you’re going to get places by SEPTA only, probably staying in the city limits is the way to go.
Oh! Make sure you calculate Philly taxes into the cost of living. If you work in Philadelphia and don’t live in the city limits, you pay city wage tax at 3.72% or something. If you do live in the city limits, whether you work in the city or not, Philly city taxes are 3.93%. Taxes can be a substantial chunk of money. But Philly’s dysfunctional division between suburbs and city — many or most of the wealthier residents of the greater Philadelphia area live in the suburbs, for reasons largely having to do with “white flight” (ugh) in the 1970s and 80s — means that the city is broke all the time and needs that tax income.
I’ve been in a few of the neighborhoods in Philly, though not many–my visits have always been somewhat short, just a few days, so I’ve spent a lot of time in Center City, aside from quick roams through other parts. I know what gentrification means in terms of, you know, the definition of the word, but what does it mean when you’re looking to move to a place? Does it mean property values are going to go up, rent, etc? (This may be a dumb question, but I’ve mainly lived in small towns and smaller cities my whole life, so I’m not 100% sure on some aspects of city living). Also, what’s the best way to FIND housing? Craigslist? A particular company or companies? I’m also not sure how much time I’ll have–my employment history has been somewhat unusual, you see, I’ve never done the whole “find a job and then have to move” thing. I’ve done a lot of seasonal work (summer camp) and then my last job was acquired once I was already living in Michigan. So…I am still trying to figure out how to adult.
Aren’t we all figuring out how to adult? (I’m in my mid-thirties and am still working on a bunch of adulting stuff.)
In Philly, I certainly want gentrification. Gentrification in Philadelphia means “there are cafes, and grocery stores, and the occasional neighborhood bookstore.” It also means, “There are not gaping holes covered with boards on the walls of all of the rowhouses on my block.” Except in Center City, rent is not awful anywhere (with the caveat that my last city was in the East Bay and I used to pay truly astronomical rent there, so my sense of rent is skewed). Rents are rising in some places, but it isn’t really a big deal.
You can try Craigslist, but don’t move in to a Craiglist apartment until you’ve walked through the area and figured out what you want. I found my current apartment just by looking up apartment buildings in a particular area and checking all of them out, but I knew Philadelphia, and I knew where my job was and where I wanted to be in relationship to that job. I’m not sure what to suggest if you only have a brief time to hunt for apartments, though. D:
If you have more questions, try me at rymenhild at yahoo dot com. I don’t promise to know all the answers, as you see, but I have lived in Philly and its suburbs for about 2/3 of my life.
Briefly de-lurking to say: come to South Philly! It’s great! It’s way more accessible via bike (you’ll want to have a bike) to the rest of the city than Fishtown/Port Richmond/Kensington, but it’s still super reasonable to rent. Plus you won’t be surrounded by undergrads like you will in West Philly (also UPenn/Drexel are buying a bunch of houses to turn into student housing and they’re driving the rent up. I have Opinions about it, because I went to one of those schools, but I’m definitely digressing). I’ve found every apartment I’ve ever lived in on Craigslist. Really though – where do your friends live? You should live near them.
You’ll only need a TransPass (bus/subway within the city) if you are taking a trip that requires a transfer twice a day. Otherwise it’s more economical to stick with tokens. The TrailPass is for Regional Rail, so you would only need that if you were commuting by train outside the city every day.
I’m originally from a smaller city in the Midwest, and I loooooove Philly and I’m never leaving. I even bought a house, like some kind of real person.
My friends don’t live in Philly proper. They’re down in West Chester, or in Malvern, or Shippensburg, or Allentown, or otherwise within a few hours of the city. They’re close enough I’d be able to see them a few times a month, maybe. But simply being in Philadelphia would be better than where I am now–I saw them once a year ago and then again this past weekend, and they’re all really special to me. I want to be with my tribe.
I’d love to have a bike! I’ve never really biked in a major city though and it makes me a little anxious. Do people yell at you? Is there plenty of room in most streets?
I did have a guy shout at me that I had wussy buttocks once, and you’ll occasionally get honked at for existing, but cyclists are everywhere and drivers have mostly learned to deal with it. I ride my bike to work pretty much every day that the weather allows it, and it’s mostly pleasant (I do get a lot of flat tires but I think that’s specific to my route). There are lots of streets with bike lanes, and lots more that are quiet/wide enough that you don’t need them. I have several friends who don’t own cars, and just get everywhere by either public transit or bicycle. My line of work makes that impossible for me, but I would do it in a heartbeat if I could.
Malvern & West Chester are both pretty easy to get to via Regional Rail, and if you’ve got a car then you don’t have to bother with that nonsense and it’ll be even easier.
my ultimate urban biker newbie safety tips are get USB rechargeable lights (they stay nice and bright if you charge them on the regs) and bike as nice and slow as you want. side streets are your friend! it’ll be a little scary at first but you’ll get used to it. and get a functional but crappy looking bike to help with theft prevention. there is nothing like the freedom of leaving somewhere and rolling home on your bike. enjoy!
Ooh, late to this, but I live in Philadelphia!
* Monthly SEPTA passes are $91, but you can also purchase packets of tokens in various increments from newsstands and the like, in case you wind up not using transit enough to justify the expense of a pass.
* The place I’m living in now has a flat fee for all utilities rolled into the rent (which is niiice, try to score something like that if you can), so I don’t have a good handle on what electricity/gas/water/etc might cost.
* My girlfriend and I do a big grocery trip about once a month–using the grocery store discount card (we go to Superfresh) and also being savvy about looking for store brands/stuff on sale, each trip is usually around $200, though we’re shopping for the two of us.
Let me know if you have more money questions, or just Philly questions in general!
The first time I took SEPTA I was like “omfg I have no idea what I’m doing please help me” to the nice man on the train and…he kinda judged me, but helped me out. 😛 It’s good to know about the tokens! Maybe when I move I’ll just buy them as I go for a month and see how much that costs and see if it’s better to buy a pass or just buy tokens. Also, if you’re primarily taking SEPTA places, is it hard to go grocery-shopping in that way? Like, is it a giant pain to have to get your groceries on and stuff? Or does that depend on when you’re doing it? Are there farmers’ markets to be found inside the city proper? I know that SE PA has some amazing farms in general (I worked near them!) but what about in Philly itself? Have you ever had your groceries delivered?
Lastly, do you know anyone who works in public health? That’s kinda the thing I’m looking to do–health education, or working for a company in that capacity, whatever. My degree’s in biology.
Not even SEPTA has any idea what they’re doing half the time (their motto is “We’re getting there!” which is tragic and hilarious, all at once), so don’t worry about being transit-clueless. 🙂 Starting out with tokens is what my girlfriend and I did; she’s moved on to the monthly pass (her work subsidizes it), but it’s actually easier for me to just buy oodles of tokens once a month–I work on a college campus where you can buy tokens super-easily, but not passes.
Onto your other questions:
* Using SEPTA to get to and from the grocery store is doable, but outside of small Trader Joe’s runs, I’ve actually never done it? Although we use the bus as our primary way of getting around, my girlfriend also owns a car for errand-running and such. If you were going to just use SEPTA, though, I’d probably suggest making smaller, more frequent grocery trips, or investing in one of those wheely-cart things so you can get on and off the bus quickly.
* There are a bunch of farmer’s markets! (here is a list: http://thefoodtrust.org/farmers-markets) They’re…kind of teeny? I’m from Portland, and was used to the giant Saturday market that basically took up a large swath of the Park Blocks, so my perspective may be a little skewed. If there’s one in or near wherever you wind up living, it’s worth checking out.
* I have never had grocery delivery, but! I am part of a CSA (through Philly Foodworks), which I love. They have pickup points throughout the city, and if you wind up in one of their delivery zones, I think it’s $5 per delivery. They also have super flexible options in terms of veggie boxes (we get basically a half-share, which is enough for two people), so you wouldn’t be swimming in more veggies than you could possibly eat.
* I actually do know one person who’s interested in public health (if not working in it–she’s a yoga instructor), but she’s actually leaving for a PhD program in public health this summer.
I’m giggling so hard at that SEPTA motto. i was just in PA this past weekend visiting friends, and when I was taking the train back home, a friend in NJ happened to message me. I said, “oh hey, I’m on a train” and he said “Septa?” right as I was saying “we are currently not moving” and he said “definitely a Septa train. The r in Septa stands for reliable.”
I lived in Marquette, MI for 2.5 years. Our growing season was soooo short, and our farmer’s market so adorable and tiny. It was hard to get things to grow there, so really, anything will be an improvement over that–plus, I am so spoiled on NC produce that I always go in with low expectations. I would love to do a CSA! I couldn’t really do one in MI because they were too expensive and I didn’t really have enough storage space for the amount of veggies I’d get, but maybe I’ll be able to make it happen in Phila.
I moved into a just evicted house right after my divorce with three kids. It was August. It was the first week of school. I had a kid in elementary, a kid in middle, and a kid in high school, and I was in grad school an hour away. That place was horrible. The previous tenants had butchered deer in the sink, kept god knows what in kennels made out of scrap parts in the backyard and not cleaned ever, and we spent weeks painting layer after layer of kilz and scrubbing and getting things replaced. Lived there a year. Got the kennels bulldozed, put in a huge garden, and in one day (again, the week before school started) asshold landlord shows up and says “I sold my house, you need to leave, I’m moving in”. He basically evicted me before I could even think about it, BECAUSE AT THE VERY SAME MINUTE, my son was at my ex’s house for visitation hearing that “your father beat me up and is in jail, you need to leave”. So, you know, I was distracted (no job at the time, living on spousal support, student loan, and child support, and kid was a senior that year). His senior year did not go well. We found a new place with this nice little old lady and man living next door. It was teeny. and brown. wood on walls, floors, ceilings, and where it wasn’t wood, it was painted brown. Had flies all over the house and couldn’t figure out why, house was spotless. Had yellowjackets coming through the walls and stinging my kids. Had no room and basically didn’t unpack for a year. No kitchen table or dishwasher. Found out that nice little old lady was a crazy witch. Found out that nice little old man liked to peek into my shower window. Found out that they LIKED TO BRING HOME ROADKILL AND LEAVE IT IN MY YARD FOR THE VULTURES. ENTIRE DEER CARCASSES 30 feet from my deck. When I complained that my daughter couldn’t go outside and play and that the flies and smell were overwhelming, they threatened to kick me out. We lived in the center of “town” acrosss from McDonald’s and they were attracting coyotes to the yard which then moved the dead bodies (at one time there were 7 carcasses on a half acre lot). I complained to the landlady again and she said, “oh, we don’t know what’s moving them, some critters (!!!!) but we put up a game camera to find out”–She put up a webcam aimed at my backyard without telling me!!!!!
we called the health dept several more times and moved out. My rent is much higher but there are no vultures. This week the vultures (they are migratory) came back. There are already 5 over that house. There have been as many as 30+ before. They haven’t rented it out yet, either.
When my parents bought their first house (in their early 20s, on low-level public sector salaries – NOT THAT I’M BITTER AT ALL) they went for a meal with the couple selling it beforehand, and they were very nice and friendly; the four of them got on well. A short time after they moved, the plumbing went catatstrophically wrong (apparently there was “shit coming down the walls”). The plumber told them that the pipes leading away from the house were massively blocked by tree roots; it must have been causing problems for years based on the level of blockage and there’s no way it could have gone unnoticed. The nice couple had not mentioned anything about this.
My partner and I moved in together a year and a half ago and it has been good, but we have had a few problems with the flat we’re renting. It is at basement and ground floor level, and has a damp problem; some corners are really mouldy. (Also, the tenancy agreement says that we need to keep the walls clean, but also that we can’t cause any damage to the paint; it is really cheap paint and comes straight off if wiped with plain water, let alone bleach. We explained to the agents that they had to pick an option.) The plumber the letting agency uses is creepyand patronising and we have banned him from the flat; on several occasions maintenance people were given keys to the flat without the agents giving us 24 hours’ notice, as required by law; when we turned on the central heating for the first time, the radiators leaked because the decorators hadn’t screwed them back onto the walls properly after painting. It took the plumber several goes to fix it, and on the first attempt he visited the flat without me or my partner being notified at all. I only found out when I got home and saw water all over the floor, because he had failed to fix the leaks and had moved the containers I had underneath them to catch the drips. I was furious.
Ho boy. The place I rent now wins my personal award for both most fun and nastiest house I’ve ever lived in.
To start off with, I live in Wellington, a city built entirely on precipices. Even for this town my house is hard to get to, being up a paper “road” that consists entirely of 165 rickety steps. We know who our true friends are now – the people who will brave the stairs to visit. We keep a bottle of water and mug on the porch in summer for the hardy, sweating souls who’ve made the climb. We all have amazingly buff calf muscles.
The house itself is a rickety 1930s workingman’s cottage with hand-installed 1930s wiring and plumbing. When we moved in a year ago, first the power would intermettently blow up, then the water shut off, then the hot water tank carked it and left us showerless for a week. When the electrician came, he looked at the wiring in our lounge, pointed to one marked ‘M’ and said, “Do you know what this wire is for? I don’t.” We have developed a sophisticated system of tripping our fuses that for some reason works to turn the power back on when it blows, but noone knows why. The plumbing does not appear on any council maps, and neither do the wires. Grey water from the bathroom drains into an open sump next to the house which we have to unclog with a hose every four months. This is an adventure. We draw straws.
On the South side of the house (remember, we are in the Southern Hemisphere. South means cold) all the window-frames are beginning to pull away from the house and Antarctic winds whistle through finger-wide gaps. Our laundry (fully equipped though!) is a tiny, unlined room underneath the house full of spiders, with a sloping floor. This summer, a floorboard in the laundry rotted right through AND two planks snapped with rot on the deck. The landlord is going to fix it… this month sometime.
On the plus side, the place is dirt cheap (many people around here pay about 40% more for their own hovels) and fits six people, which is how many friends and relations I want to live with. It has beautiful views and is close to everything we want. it’s been passed down from friend to friend for over ten years before we got it, and we still have photos of everyone who’s lived here, those we know and those we don’t, on the kitchen wall. Most of all, I feel like we, the people, have now broken the house in. It was horrible and we tamed it and decorated its walls and fixed the meandering path and got its plumbing going again, and now it’s less horrible. This house will be MINE and know it…
So congratulations on yours, Mallory! May you enjoy your house as much as we do ours. May it be more tractable as a house should be. And I heartily second getting yourself good tools. A hammer with a slightly convex nose, ok? A pair of long-nose pliers. Different sized nails. A screwdriver set. Wire-cutters. Mousetraps. Just in case.
This house sounds insane and amazing.
Well once I found a drowned rat in the toilet of the worst basement sublet imaginable. That was pretty bad.
Mallory — Am I remembering right that your place is in Oakland? If so, you should know about the Oakland Tool Lending Library. Tool Libraries are amazing and should exist in more places.
http://oaklandlibrary.org/locations/tool-lending-…
I live on the Berkeley/Oakland border and a super cute house down the street from me just sold. I was kind of hoping Mallory had bought it (is that weird? probably) until I noticed the other day that it has no driveway. Street parking forever? Eff that.
Tarps are a good thing to buy! You never know when you’ll need them.
[Dreams of Mallory as a down-the-street neighbour are not weird, don’t worry]
Mallory living down the street will definitely make the neighborhood go up in value. Buy now! Prices are hot hot hot!
I tried to convince my husband to sell our house, but he thought we should wait. I persistently politely disagreed with him for months.
Then the rains came and it rained for 2 months straight. It took 2 weeks after the rains stopped for yard to dry out, and all this time I had begun dropping hints about selling the house more frequently. I complained about our neighbors more, and pointed out the probable rat nest along the side corner of the backyard. A squirrel was electrocuted on one of the overhead powerlines, and it was witnessed by our toddler. What kind of place was this to raise a child?
The side yard still hadn’t entirely dried, and a small trickle of water persisted. A week passed, and the trickle from the side continued unabated, the earth muddy, but no rain had fallen for weeks. We asked the city to investigate, and the associate manager’s best guess was that a culverted stream had branched off, or a new spring had “come up.” Unlucky us. Our real estate agent assured us that was unlikely bullshit. An environmental engineer and a plumber investigated as the weeks ticked by in the hot selling season.
By this time, my husband was listening to me and also wished to sell. With a mystery leak from the side yard that by now was traversing the crawl space under the house on a diagonal, and draining across the driveway and into the street gutter, though, we were not in a strong bargaining position. Eventually, a recalcitrant absentee landlord, who to this day is a well-known antiques dealer in Berkeley, agreed that they were the source and corrected the problem.
In the end, we sold the house at the bottom of one of those micro-troughs in the market, we and probably walked away with $30,000 less in profit than we would have otherwise. Welcome to the ranks of homeowners.
I shared a house with a bunch of friends in our second year of University. It was a beautiful, but neglected, Victorian row house in Toronto, on a street that boasts one of the city’s oldest strip clubs, a men’s hostel, and a juvenile detention centre. We ended up with gigantic rats when construction started across the street and, being a house of naive vegetarians, we called up a humane trapping company to come get our rats and take them to a nice rat spa somewhere outside of the city. The guy who answered the phone said, “Lady, you got vermin. Vermin gets killed.”
Ahhaha.
In my current house, but with previous roommates, we had a mouse or two. They would come in in the night and run around our counters and snack on our fruits and avocados. My roommate had some kind of sentimental attachment to the mouse, and insisted on doing nothing, and then using live traps, which were useless. Eventually I put my foot down and demanded we call a pest control company, that really just blocked up our gaps to the outside. They put out snap traps too, but we never caught anything.
Just explain to those types of people that mice have very poor vision. They actually navigate to and from their nest by leaving a tiny adorable trail of pee everywhere they go. They use their sense of smell to follow it home. So anywhere you have mice you have a crisscrossing map of pee on every food surface. So cute!
Or just show this darling list of diseases! Note that these are just the directly transmitted ones. There are plenty of cuddly indirectly rodent transmitted diseases as well. <3
http://www.cdc.gov/rodents/diseases/direct.html
Hardware stores is almost the only kind of shopping that is fun! A stepladder tall enough to reach the ceiling or at least top of highest shelf/cabinet in home. A plunger. Utility knife. Pliers, a drill and an adjustable wrench; I assume you already own a hammer & screwdrivers. A level, in case you want to hang pictures or curtain rods – and if you don’t plan on doing that people will still just be so impressed that you own a level.
My first apartment, the landlord tried to keep the security deposit because we had never swept the steps leading down to the first floor.
First apartment post-divorce was in NYC, specifically Washington Heights. A bodega right outside my first floor window, a hospital 4 blocks away, a lot of friendly neighborhood pot dealers. The short hallway from the living area to the bathroom had questionably stable flooring.No one would fix it, and I was told to just put a rug over it. That worked until a chunk of floor just gave way altogether. Th super’s son-in law came to fix it, and was pleasant until he started hitting me up for cash and loans.
Next place was about 20 minute’s train ride outside of the city. Huge place with 2 exposures and cheap rent. And a CRAZY neighbor who had a very unhealthy relationship with her daughter. They both tried to seduce the super, a knife was drawn when jealousies arose. Mom was volatile, daughter played super loud music every day after school, for hours. We eventually found our balance, she let me stay in her apartment when I was locked out and the super took 2 hours to come home from clubbing to let me in. I bought a scratcher for her new cat as a thank you. We had reached a compromise about the music, until one day I texted her to ask if she was going to be home and playing music for a while, or going out. I took the dog out for a walk and ran into her coming back. She began to jab her finger at my face, yelling about why would I text something like that if I wasn’t even home? Did I have some kind of problem with her? I tried to explain it was a simple misunderstanding. I had gone out for a minute but was coming back. But she didn’t want to hear it. She continued to threaten me and yell about being pissed off until I broke into tears on the street. I blurted “what is wrong with you? why are you yelling at me, I didn’t do anything!” She calmed down and attempted to smooth things over, but I was wary. She claimed to sleep with a knife under her bed. After that I just stayed out of her way. The new neighbor on the other side became a noise problem. I could hear the TV through the wall, when she played loud music my walls vibrated. Twice I knocked to ask if she wouldn’t mind turning it down. Just twice. First time, she said it couldn’t possibly be too loud, she could barely hear the living room stereo while cooking in the kitchen. Next time she lost her shit and said I was harassing her and it wasn’t too loud, and it wasn’t the bass. After all, I only seemed to complain when she played one specific song. She said she was done with me and I should “do what I had to do”, but she was done. After that reasonable discussion, I left her a note explaining that I was moving my furniture away from the shared wall, and I wouldn’t bother her again. When I saw the man of the house in the hallway or elevator, I went out of my way to smile and say hello, and he was always friendly, making chit chat and so on. This girl told my other neighbor that I’d been harassing her and that she’d filed complaints with the landlord because of it. I called the landlord, stricken. I hadn’t meant to upset anyone. He said there were no complaints about me from anyone. I believed him, because he was known to share his feelings about tenants. He once made a youtube channel specifically to post embarrassing security camera footage of the tenants. Later, she also claimed that they were moving out because of my impossible harassment. Which was a total lie, her parents were moving back to Jamaica to be with ailing family.
First and so far only house, my advice: If you do get a puppy, don’t leave it unattended even if you have a fenced in yard. My little guy was notorious for wiggling under fences and wandering the neighborhood. If you can, plant stuff . It’s very satisfying to be in the same place long enough to see the results of your handiwork. Whatever you like, be it flowers or strawberries or kale, it’feels real good to do something with your yard that an apartment could just never give you.
I woke up in the middle of the night to the sounds of a child being tortured, but it turned out it was one of the college girls next door massively faking a series of orgasms. Her partner was less enthusiastic, judging by the lack of reciprocal screaming.
I lived in an apartment building run by a slumlord who specialized in renting to drug dealers and unwary college students. (Guess which one I was?) The place was raided by police three times in the two years that I lived there; once by the SWAT team.
I actually have a lot of great stories from that building, which I will selfishly hold onto. Who knows: someday I may write my memoirs, and I’m going to need material. But I will leave you with images of these characters:
*Phil, the bipolar building manager (volunteer) who fed all the stray cats in the neighborhood and had a tattoo on his chest that was so bad, I was sure he had drawn it on himself with a Sharpie. (That is, until it was still there months later.) He was out of work on disability, and thus hung out around the building a lot. If anything went down while I wasn’t home, I knew I could go to Phil for the scoop.
*The Chinese man who lived upstairs with his young family. He used to bring me bottles of wine to open because he didn’t know how to use a corkscrew. He was terrified of cats. (See above re: Phil.)
*Steve: chatty upstairs neighbor who would, on occasion, pass out on the stairs next to a bottle of 5 O’Clock vodka. He had an uncanny ability to schedule these “naps” on days my parents would visit. His wife hated me.
*Various heroin addicts: they liked to shoot up in the tree-shaded alley outside my balcony.
As far as terrible, quirky roommates go, you can’t beat living in a co-op on a liberal university campus. There was Noe, the French student who juggled, left his milk out on the shelf next to the cereal, and (quite naturally) didn’t wear antiperspirant. His go-to party outfit was a pair of royal blue overalls he would wear sans shirt in order to best display his hairy armpits. About 10 minutes after arriving, the entire party would smell of those armpits.
In the co-ops, your house “charges” included shared food. A Korean student who was dissatisfied with the food distribution system for our house (as we all were) penned a pretty epic email that railed against the follies of instilling power in those who are “unworthy” and included the phrase “while milk and honey flow [at our sister house], we desperately mix together orange powder with water for drink”. That email was BEAUTIFUL, and I’m still upset that I lost it when an old email address was hacked.
I got into a ridiculous pissing contest with Karen, the house “work manager”, who would leave passive agressive notes detailing the inadequacies of my vacuuming technique taped to my door. They were written on pink paper with purple ink.
I could go on. But let me add: if it sounds like I’m making fun of these people, believe me, that is not the case. I have genuine warmth and affection for each person mentioned. (Well, maybe not Karen…) Eccentrics are the best. 😀
Hey, we’re SWAT team buddies! (I had a horrible neighbor taken away by them– one of the happiest days of my life).
Find out where to turn off the utilities in the event of disaster – if one requires a special key/wrench, hang it on a chain at valve, etc., so always there in emergency. All the tool advice above is great – WD40 and duct tape forever.
I lived in so many bad apartments my mom once bought me a comic called “Shithole- the story of my first apartment” because it reminded her of “everywhere you have lived”
http://microcosmpublishing.com/catalog/zines/2528…
It’s a great comic, but really none of their stories seem that bad comparatively.
I and a rotating inventory of between 3 – 6 other grad students and craigslist randos lived in a Crown Heights (Brooklyn) top-floor walk-up apartment. “Top-floor” is crucial here, because the building was heated via radiator, so the steam release valve for the whole system let out in our kitchen.
Because we had no control over turning the heat on or off, our kitchen was often rendered virtually tropical; the steam got so thick it fogged. In itself, this wasn’t unlivable. What was unlivable was how the steam would melt the varnish on the crown molding and as the steam became condensation on the sagging ceiling would run toward and then rain down on the floor in the center of the room. Thus, we had charmingly varnished linoleum in the kitchen, to which both socks and small insects stuck.
Also the black mold wasn’t very nice.
Meanwhile, in the basement level the building owners were running some kind of weekly dance party every Saturday (they got printed vinyl banners and everything, and we believed at one point were trying to get some kind of club licensing for the place), which played teeth-chatteringly loud music that went on as long as the bars were open, that is to say, until 4am. Every weekend.
I moved to Los Angeles to be with my (now-ex)bf last year. The first month was lovely, we lived in a tiny guest house with his young son and our combined 3 dogs. The landlord, however, had rented the place to my bf KNOWING there was a gas leak. When I called the gas company to come fix it (thank goodness I was home to notice–we would have come home to a house of dead dogs) the landlord lost his mind because apparently my bf never told him I was moving in and I needed to leave immediately. So the whole family moved.
We found an AMAZING 3 bedroom condo and we moved ASAP. It even had this HUGE deck for the dogs to play and hang out on. I was on the lease, BF was on the lease. Because we had to live in Santa Monica to stay in his son’s school district and I could NOT afford Santa Monica prices while I was still looking for work, we agreed I’d pay way less rent than he did. That’s cool, cause he made about 4x what I did on a good day anyways.
Enter Horrible Housemate, who moved in less than a month after we got the condo. She was an exlover of his from 5 years ago, but they’d been good friends since they stopped shacking up. She was moving to LA and needed a place for her and her dog to stay for a few weeks while she found her own place and a job. I agreed to have her live with us as a guest for a max of 6 weeks. I let bf handle all the chats with her because I’d only briefly met her the previous year.
Turns out he agreed to let her stay THREE MONTHS and ACCEPT RENT. This, in addition to her large (70 lbs) bully breed dog, was a HUGE GIGANTIC violation of out lease. Her dog also bit one of our dogs on THE FIRST DAY. This dog, apparently, was intensely fear-aggressive and would go after all our dogs and start fights,etc. Housemate only got a crate for him after we pushed her. THE KICKER though is how aggressive her dog was towards bf’s 7 yr old son. His kid spent weeks in his room with the door closed because there was a huge dog that wanted to bite his face. It took almost a full month before bf and I (cause Housemate did jack shit) trained her dog to be reasonably trustworthy around our dogs and his son. Housemate refused to see any kind of trainer, read training books, or actively participate in training at all.
She also never cleaned up after her dog. When she first moved in, we lent her bedding so she didn’t have to unpack right away. She let her dog stain the HELL out of that bedding, and returned it unwashed (reeking of dog, hair all over it). She also let her dog throw up and piss on the brand-new carpet without cleaning it up.
She brought guests over without letting me know (but always asked my bf) and would literally storm off and slam the door to her room any time I tried to bring up anything with her. Trying to bond with her was just her being mean and catty about bf and his son and dismissive of me. Instead of getting a job, she spent her time 1. watching netflix 2. with her brand new bf or 3. at bars and concerts. She drank while babysitting–after going on a date for my birthday, we came home to her drunk, when she was supposed to be watching his son. I eventually stopped trying to have a relationship with her and just focused on how many days before she would move out.
It came to a head when bf was constantly defending her, blaming me for everything (um yes, it is totally my fault she got bitten because her dog started a fight when I wasn’t even home ok), etc. All that plus still being out of work and turning over literally every single penny for rent to live with this terrible person, I dumped that asshole, moved in a week, and was even nice enough not to report his to the landlord for having that horrible person there. Sometime I check the LA news just to see if she’s being hit by a semi.
So that was my worst roommate story. Also my worst bf story. Double whammy.
I was subletting an apartment in Brooklyn for the summer from a woman who was across the country on a four month business trip. I guess she was paranoid that I’d go nuts and trash her belongings or set her furniture on fire or something, so after I’d been there a few weeks she sent over her (male, huge/hulking/muscular) best friend to check on things. Which wouldn’t have been that unreasonable – if he’d rung the doorbell and introduced himself politely. Which he didn’t. Instead, he had his own key and (on her instruction, I later found out) just quietly let himself in AT SIX O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING WHILE I WAS STILL ASLEEP. I woke up to the sounds of him poking around in the kitchen. All I had on was a pair of men’s boxers (because August in New York.) I screamed.
When I first met the woman who owned the apartment, she asked a lot of questions about my day-to-day schedule and personal life, and she seemed very interested when I said I tend to get up/leave for work pretty early most mornings (this whole thing just so happened to take place on my day off). In hindsight, I realized that she’d planned to do this FROM THE BEGINNING.
So creepy. God.
My worst neighbor (in the apartment below mine) ended up being taken away by a SWAT team, after locking himself inside for hours and claiming he had a gun. (I had called the cops regarding his ridiculous levels of music blasting, and had also had to call them several times previously to report his domestic violence incidents).
As part of his insane rage, he threw a pumpkin out the window (it was close to Halloween), and also kicked a hole in his giant flat-screen TV. One of the cops mournfully said, “He ruined a beautiful TV!”
I never saw him again, and I never complained about paying local taxes after that– I feel like I really got my money’s worth out of that SWAT team.
Also, the cops brought his mother over to plead for him to give himself up. (“Come out, Joe, I’m too old for this.”) It was just like on TV.
The most bizarre apartment I ever looked at had neon yellow kitchen counters with seashells embedded in them, and a huge rack full of the landlord’s sneakers right in the middle of the kitchen. Apparently, they came with the place.
The landlord didn’t live on the premises, but I would’ve had to allow him to host macrobiotic dinners in my living room every Wednesday night for 10-15 people. And he had a “massage studio” upstairs. And he spent a *lot* of time talking about his dead mother.
(Right before I saw this apartment, my mom had said, “Well, I haven’t seen anyplace I’d run screaming from yet”. We had to revise that assertion immediately afterwards).
I once rented a basement flat in an old building which was on a very busy main road. It was very beautiful and also it was my first flat together with my girlfriend so romance took precedence over traffic and noise considerations. It was all great except for when:
1) A drunk tramp fell asleep in front of our front door and we couldn’t move him. We tried cold water and shouting and shoving. We had to call the police. When they woke him up (with truncheons!!!) he tried to tell them it was his flat and we were the intruders.
2) because we were in a basement flat our ‘outside space’ was basically the back steps that led up to the garden which belonged to the ground floor flat. Another tenant a few floors up used to toss (sorry bad choice of word) his wank-tissues out of the window where they would inevitably land on our steps. That was nice to clear up. At least he used tissues I guess.
3) The people upstairs installed a pole dancing pole and engaged in loud sex, often accompanied to Marilyn Manson-esque music. Given that the only thing that separated us were some victorian floorboards and a dusting of plaster, this was the last straw.
We moved out a year later and we still miss the flat even though we now own a flat together instead. The sex-goths from upstairs still say hi when I see them on the street..
Congrats, Mallory on your new house! Here is my best/worst renting story:
My husband and I made a cross-country move back to my hometown a few years ago. We rented one half of a somewhat decrepit duplex sight-unseen. Bad decision, obviously. The duplex backed up to a major highway AND traintracks. Our house shook when the train passed through. It was also infested with cockroaches. The worst part, though, was that our landlady started sneaking into our unit to drink alcohol from our bar. It turned out she was an alcoholic who had recently fallen off the wagon. She was a nice lady and it was a sad situation, but we had to get the fuck out of there. Since she broke the terms of our lease we were able to move after six months.
A lot of the worst roommates are far too identifiable, but the second-best landlord I ever had was just bizarre. He was very nice and normal and technically very attentive, except for how he would put great effort and urgency into fixing problems we didn’t have in lieu of those we did. There was the time our washer had been broken for a week and a half, so he said he would send someone over and someone did come over within hours… to paint the stairs and hallways. Good job! Lovely clean neat house! Still no washer! Or the time our back door was stuck, so he replaced our fence (we got a lockpicking friend to sort the door). Sweet, strange man. We’re pretty sure he was illiterate, but for that exact reason all our communications with him were over the phone to avoid misunderstandings…
I was a nerdy lil student in my first semester of grad school, living on my own in a studio apartment on the second floor of a 1920s brick building. Things were going swimmingly, I thought, until I got home one night early in December and discovered a letter from the landlord pushed under my door. It said that since the police had already been sent to my apartment twice on noise complaints, this was my final warning before they would be starting eviction proceedings.
I called them up, totally baffled, and asked when precisely police had come to my apartment. The dates they gave me were Labor Day weekend and Thanksgiving weekend. “And you didn’t even answer the door,” they said disapprovingly. Well, that’s because I wasn’t even in the state either time, let alone in the apartment. “Well, your downstairs neighbor called them, and he has called us too, and you need to watch how much noise you’re making.”
The downstairs neighbor had indeed come up once when I was in the apartment, watching Pride & Prejudice with a high school friend. (The BBC Colin Firth version, because that’s how hard I roll.) He looked like a linebacker, and his glare was fierce as he told me to keep it down. We were baffled, but spoke in whispers the rest of the night.
After the letter, things got worse. Packages addressed to me in the common area were split open and their contents strewn on the floor. The police came twice more in the middle of the night as I was sleeping, once at 2 a.m., once at 4:30 a.m. They seemed highly suspicious at my grogginess, like perhaps this was an elaborate show I was putting on. Finally, on the third early-morning visit (well, the third visit when I was actually there) one of the officers looked intently in my eyes and said, “Ma’am, can we come in?” I blinked and said, “Sure.”
As soon as they were both inside and the door was closed, one of the cops said, “Ma’am, do you have somewhere to go? He has formed some sort of vendetta against you. And we don’t think you’re safe here. We’ll stay while you pack a bag.”
My landlord did his best for me, and actually upgraded me to a one-bedroom in a different building but told me the rent would stay the same. I had to live in a friend’s basement for a week before the new apartment was ready-incidentally, the week before finals. When I sobbed and asked why I had to be the one to move, the adults in the room glanced at each other and said, “Well, eviction proceedings are hard. And it’s best he doesn’t know where you live.”
Three weeks after I moved out, the neighbor called the landlord ranting about how I was still making noise, and how he was going to take them to court because they wouldn’t make me stop.
Lived in an apartment with a boyfriend for less than a year because the landlord became oddly obsessed with me. I’d be cooking in the kitchen and see him standing on our porch staring in at me. I put up curtains. We’d come home and see our mail in our entryway, and other evidence he’d been in our apartment during the day. When we told him we were leaving, he took a video tour of our apartment and put it up on YouTube, showing the masses what kinds of things they could steal at our address. When we moved out, he went through our dumpster and emailed us asking if he could keep the various things he’d found there. He kept contacting me for the following year through different email addresses with recipes, or asking me my current address so he could “drop off mail”. I eventually had to get my lawyer involved and he stopped, though he still from time to time tries to connect over Instagram, Twitter or even LinkedIn.
Noooo I’m late! Here’s my story anyway:
The first lease I ever signed was in Chinese. This was not unusual, as the apartment was in China, but the experience would’ve been one hell of an adjustment even if I’d had any prior experience whatsoever in rentals.
It was a beautiful 4 bed/2 bath apartment, fully furnished, with granite floors and a chandelier in the living room for some reason. The neighbors were wonderful and friendly, rent was absurdly cheap, the landlord assured us that all utilities would be deducted from our security deposit at the end of the lease but we would otherwise receive it back in full provided we didn’t destroy the place (here he mimed taking out walls with a sledgehammer), Chinese leasing practices do not include provisions like “the apartment will be livable and free of other people’s possessions when you move in” or “the landlord is responsible for repairs”, and my roommates and I were three American dirtbags who liked adventure and had not yet developed a taste for comfort so we found it all wildly entertaining.
Some highlights: moving in to find terrifyingly sticky floors, a kitchen full of dirty dishes and rotting food, and the previous tenants’ discarded personal possessions/trash. One bathroom was locked shut with a note on the door explaining that none of the plumbing worked. The other bathroom’s plumbing was also suspect, so I taught myself the art of toilet repair in a hands-on environment. Also, the bathroom ceiling leaked and constantly drizzled water into our assortment of buckets. It was cold water, because the building had neither hot water nor any form of insulation. The Israeli couchsurfers we hosted in our spare bedroom took pity on us and acquired and installed a shower head while we were out of the apartment. This solved the problem of the showers taken under a pipe sticking out of the wall, but not the fact that these showers were bitterly cold, so as winter approached we started boiling water on the stove and taking sponge baths in the empty tub. Our front door lock was hilariously complicated and could only be opened by sheer luck and persistence. There were actually two front doors, the second one held open by a rotten watermelon when we moved in. When someone moved it and closed the door by mistake, we had to hire an old man to break in to our apartment because none of us had keys for the second door and neither did the landlord.
When it came time to go home, our landlord, true to his word, returned our security deposit in full, minus about $100 for six months of utilities. He did this three days before we moved out of the apartment. I promptly blew my entire share of the deposit bribing an airline official to check my most overweight suitcase and get me on my plane home (leaving in fifteen minutes) while I sobbed in a busy airport terminal and he begged me not to cry. They lost the bag anyway.
Things to do to your house:
Whenever you change your clocks for daylight savings, Flip your mattress, change the batteries in your smoke detector, text your fire extinguishers (one in the kitchen, one under your bed, and one wherever you burn candles), and change your air filters.
I’ll text them, but I’m not sure they have a plan.
(I’ll test them, too, that’s a good idea that I forgot to do last week)
I was sick yesterday, so I’m just getting around to this. It might get lost, but someone might read it and find it interesting.
Back in the early 90s, I lived in an apt with my now ex fiance. It was super bowl Sunday. I was super sick with a migraine but I went to work anyway.
Turns out, not only did I have carbon monoxide poisoning, he and his friend found two other friends dead in the basement of the apt building.
That’s the short version of the story. I just realized I need to write a memoir.
The very first apartment I ever sublet, I ended up living with a friend whose initial housing situation wasn’t working out. I was happy to live with that friend, but her roommate had to move in too, and she’d leave half-eaten bowls of food throughout her room. Not just on dressers- on floors, IN drawers, etc. When it was time to leave the apartment, we found a used pregnancy test in a half-eaten bowl of ramen, hidden in a dresser drawer.
The Great Bedbug Scare of ’04 struck my college while I was living in a four-bedroom university-owned apartment on campus with three other women. (I’ll spare everyone the horrific saga of how I discovered we had bedbugs *shudder*) They moved all of us temporarily to separate under-utilized apartments while they fumigated, which took about three weeks. In the mean time, I got sent to a six-bedroom apartment where only one roommate ever introduced herself, told me her name, or ever left her room when I was home (were there three other mystery roommates in that apartment or four? I’ll never know for sure). The one friendly roommate, who’d been living there for at least four months, didn’t even know for sure how many other women were living in the apartment.
No one did their dishes. Ever. You couldn’t even use the kitchen sink most of the time because it was overflowing with dirty pots, mugs, everything. I took to hiding my dishes and cooking equipment in my room just so I’d actually be able to use them. But after about two weeks of watching the same plates and pans sit undisturbed in greasy, food-flecked piles, the sink situation became intolerable. In response I put up a notice, asking my “roommates” to put their crap in one side (it was one of those divided sinks) so we could run the faucet and actually do dishes, and then warning that any dishes in either side of the sink left for more than 24 hours would go in a garbage bag for them to deal with in their own sweet time. This sounds weird and passive-aggressive, I know! I would have gladly talked to my “roommates” about this at any time, but they hid in their rooms, never answered when I knocked on their doors, and I never even saw or met at least two of them (was there a third? Maybe…). 24 hours sounds strict but think about that for 5-6 people in one kitchen; it felt like a bare minimum. For evil (or mold or roaches) to flourish, it only requires good people to do nothing.
Eventually I made good on my threat and got chewed out by one of the “roommates” I’d never met. It was pretty awkward: “Yes, I *did* post that note and, yes, I *did* put your bowls in that garbage bag. Nice to meet you!” But for a few days afterward there were markedly fewer dishes left in the sink!
The worst part about living there, however, was definitely the day I went to take a shower and found the clogged bathtub full of three inches of water and at least two pounds of pubes.
In college I lived in an apartment complex with an ancient plumbing system. We were on the bottom floor. When the pipes clogged up my upstairs neighbor’s sewage exploded out of my bathtub drain. Some Stephen King horror shit right there.
Another time we had an infestation of raccoons in the crawlspace beneath the complex, and everybody got fleas for the summer.
And finally, courtesy of my terrible boyfriend/roommate: the day before I went home for Christmas break our fridge broke. All he had to do was tell the building manager to have it replaced (we actually had a very attentive manager thank goodness). But what do you know, I come home two weeks later and he has let everything rot and is living on fast food. I got it fixed within 24 hours because I’m not an ANIMAL.
I’m always late for these toast parties and they’re the kind of parties I have stories for! I really REALLY hope that Mallory gets to read this because it ends with an excellent reason to own rather than rent.
My boyfriend and I lived in a dilapidated duplex for thirteen years. Over the years, neighbors drifted in and out of the other side of the duplex, which was a mirror image of our place and therefore seemed like a creepy alternate reality. The best neighbors were The Squatters because they didn’t want to get caught. I don’t even know how many people were covertly living there during those months — several — but they came and went without ever making a sound.
The worst neighbor was The Meth Head, which probably doesn’t surprise you. But this guy was a special meth head: he planted a pumpkin and zucchini patch AND HID A SURVEILLANCE CAMERA UNDER A LOOSE BOARD NEAR THE BACK DOOR TO MAKE SURE WE DIDN’T STEAL HIS HARVEST. I think his dog did meth too because he could go from Lassie to Cujo in a split second. They moved out shortly after the dog had a psychotic break which ended with my boyfriend sprawled in the pumpkin patch.
Speaking of meth and dogs, while I was away at grad school there was a meth lab in the apartment above me. (I was familiar with the smell from my previous experience, but this was worse). The landlord claimed that most of the tenants were grad students, but it turned out that by “grad students” he meant “ex-convicts.” I discovered this one night when a spectacularly drunk woman pounded on my door demanding to use my phone because her boyfriend was going to kill her. She told me that they heard about the apartment complex from her murderous boyfriend’s prison buddies, WHO ALL LIVED THERE.
When the police arrived, my new friend left her two albino bulldogs inside with me. I don’t think they were doing meth but they definitely had emotional problems. After running through the apartment a few times they settled down to jump on my bed. I will be eternally grateful that the dog who had diarrhea all over the place missed the bed itself.
Another day, I finally called the police about the meth lab, and a couple of buffoons came over to argue condescendingly with me.
“Does it smell like dirty kitty litter?” they asked, and when I said yes, they replied, “well, then, it’s just kitty litter.”
“No,” I said, “this is definitely not kitty litter.
“Aha! Then it can’t be a meth lab, because meth labs smell like kitty litter!” one of the Kops said. We went through that routine a few times and then the other one had a suggestion:
“It’s probably just a raccoon.”
So I’m like, “what is this raccoon doing, to smell like that?”
When they finally realized that I wasn’t going to buy the raccoon story, they came up with this patronizing gem: “Well, you know, this is a college town so you get a lot of foreigners. Them foreigners cook food that smells real weird.” After that I gave up.
Did I mention that one summer while I was away the power failed and I returned to a freezer full of maggots?
Let’s forget that nightmare and return to my beloved duplex. It may have attracted odd neighbors, and there may have been rainbow-hued mold in the lead-painted kitchen cupboards, but I loved it with all my heart. We lived there from 2000-2013 — the house’s hundredth-birthday — and then it was sold from beneath our feet the day after Christmas and we were forced to move away within a month. Filthy-rich developers gave our former home an open floor plan, painted the woodwork, and turned my ivory tower of an office into an en-suite bathroom with double sinks.
Later, I discovered that THERE IS A PARK IN THIS CITY NAMED AFTER OUR FORMER LANDLORD. I was somehow naive enough to think that his family was barely scraping by on the rent we paid every month, so I didn’t press too hard when they complained about fixing things, or claimed it was impossible, or simply ignored us.
So Mallory, revel in your new house because it is YOURS. You don’t have a slumlord who golfs at a country club with slimy real estate agents. You won’t have to privately call this slimy real estate agent Marie Antoinette because he will never tell you, “I’m sorry you didn’t get more notice to leave, but you shouldn’t have wasted your money on rent when you could have been paying a mortgage all these years.” The money you put into this home will not be shredded and festooned from trees in a public park named after your slumlord.
Oh man. How did I miss this thread? I:
1) Grew up in Tehachapi,
2) Wound up being both a tenant and a landlady courtesy of the housing market debacle,
3) and have had any number of crazy roommate situations. Boo.
Thanks man! We like conquering things. I definitely know what you mean about the personality though.
MEAT BAG
I also have an intense fear of maggots as a result of summer month period trash from a house full of women. UGH.
I’ve had an interesting string of apartment roommates.
1) My first roommate was a social worker from Canada with a work visa. She worked at a juvenile detention center that only treated sex offenders. About a month after moving in, she asked if her boyfriend could stay over for the weekend. Sure, fine, no big deal. He stayed over more and more frequently, and moved in within three months. He didn’t have a job, pay rent, or do chores; he just played XBox. I found his ID one day- he was one of the students from the school who had run away, and she was sheltering him. I called the school, freaked out. She got fired and had to leave the country within 10 days.
My next two roommates were relatively normal, although one of them was a male dominatrix, and liked to clean his leather gear in the living room.
2) I had a roommate who earned the moniker “Nasty Dan”. He was VERY NICE. I want to stress that- Really ridiculously nice. And filthy. When he moved out of his room, he left 17 full sized garbage-bags worth of trash behind in his 10×10 bedroom AFTER having taken out 19 bags of garbage himself. There was a stack of pizza boxes six feet high in his closet. There were multiple jars of what can only be called ‘mystery liquid’ that were filled with a yellow-orange fluid with a cloudy white suspension in it. He moved in in August, and I stopped using the upstairs bathroom in November, and started showering at friend’s apartments instead because I couldn’t stand the smell. The toilet and the wall next to it were orange from urine splatter. It took an entire bottle of bleach to clean the bathroom after he left, and the leasing office steamed his carpets clean- twice- before admitting defeat and replacing them instead.
3) The next roommate was at least someone I knew, a friend-of-a-friend situation. She was nice, she was clean, and she had lots of sex. Copious amounts of sex. All the time. With multiple partners. I’m a bit of a prude, but I’m an open-minded prude, and I don’t care if you’re polyamorous, but I do think you should be upfront about it with all the people involved. We call her Ho-Bag Chelsea, to distinguish from the Chelsea we are still friends with. The week before she moved away, she slept with 14 different guys, many of them more than once. She actually had a schedule posted on the dry erase board in the kitchen. I joked that it would be save time to have threesomes instead of seeing them individually, and she thought it was such a great idea that she threw an orgy on her last night.
The next two roommates were normal. One of their best friend’s stole my business, though, so that relationship quickly went downhill.
4) I currently live with a friend who is a first-time homeowner, and another renter. HO refuses to listen to me about basic maintenance issues.
a) The fridge was too cold, and it was freezing all of my food for about three weeks. His solution was to tell me to stop eating vegetables, as this was clearly only an issue that affected me. HO and Renter only eat frozen pizza and chicken fingers.
b) The basement (where I have my office) has a normal amount of basement moisture to it. HO refused to buy a dehumidifier until I dragged him downstairs and showed him the fluffy ceiling mold growing there.
c) There were no keys for any of the doors when I moved in. They avoided the issue by intricately scheduling who would be home at what times, so they would never have to lock the door.
d) HO shoveled the driveway once. Halfway. In November. And refused to call a plow service, or shovel the drive, for the rest of winter. We had four feet of snow at one point.
e) I MOVE OUT IN THREE WEEKS AND I CAN’T WAIT.
I’m currently renovating my own apartment and this made me look back at the times when things weren’t so peachy.
During college, i used to live in a cramped dorm room. Two 6×12 rooms, four people, one bathroom and kitchen. Roommates and neighbors came and went, nobody seemed to give a rats ass about their living conditions. Clogged drains, overflowing sinks, mountains of dirty dishes, refrigerator full of unidentified food without a master. Loud nightly football viewings during exams. This, coupled with constant sleep deprivation and mental pressure made for a very unpleasant period.
Then some time went by, new city, new job, new life. Great, right? Wrong!
I rented the first floor in an old two story house. Landlord was on the second floor. Rent was awesome, perfect neighborhood, what could go wrong:
– landlord was a total slob, he never ever cleaned, washed or repaired anything and let the house slowly drift down the toilet
– the water heater burst in the kitchen
– his toilet started to leak and water ran down the stairs to the first floor… and not only water
– he managed to clog the sewer lines too many times to count, i often ended up showering at the workplace
– he did dishes only when he’d ran out of them. The pile was like a house of cards, I didn’t dare breathe when walking past.
– he was a hoarder, and filled every available space with worthless crap
– house was so well ventilated that curtains moved whenever there was wind outside. That’s not so great during winter
– ceiling leaked when it rained, god knows how it made it through second floor.
That’s just the cream of the crop – some things aren’t worth mentioning, some are better left unmentioned. It was so hard to endure that I eventually left.
The point is – old houses have their quirks and downfalls, but still, come on. It’s your home, and it should be cared for and kept in good shape despite its shortcomings.